Maria is in Umeå

Today it was time for Maria to go to Umeå, which involved taking the passenger train from Östergötland to Arlanda (the Stockholm airport) and then an hour long flight to Umeå. During the 2½ hour long train trip (direct train, but also the slower one) Maria actually tried to come back to research mind, reading a review article about mass spectrometry instruments. After a month outside of the research world (hardly been thinking of research), you've placed a lot of your knowledge into the back of your head.

You could notice some difference in amount of snow on the ground during the flight time. There was less when departure middle Sweden, compared to when arrive in the northern parts.

Maria will stay a few nights in the house of Olle's uncle, nice to know someone in your new hometown at least.

Another week in Småland

Back to Småland for a week, we spent time with family/relatives/friends. A few hours goes fast when you start talking and even easier if you start showing some photos.
We have quite many photos from our last years, sorted but too many to show at once. One good idea would had been to sort out the really good ones to show others, but that hasn't happen.

Another family dinner occurred on Saturday, to celebrate three birthdays in March-April. Most likely, it will take a few months until we will be together again.

New cell phones - about time

Today we bought new cell phones, the ones we had before were old already some years ago. Calling them mobile are not really right, since as soon someone called you needed to connect to a charger (=batteries too old). The new phones of course included camera, mp3-player and option to use internet, you can't really get anyone without this even if you choose the simplest one. Our plan is to not get a land line, using Skype and cell phones would work just fine.
We also passed IKEA, to buy some smaller things. Surprisingly, there's no IKEA in Umeå! How can that be - a larger Swedish (university) town without one of those?

Even more boxes...

The next week we spent in northern Östergötland, where Olle's parents live. It's also here in their attic we have stored most of our belongings during our abroad-time. Both furniture and a lot of boxes, we will have no problem to fill a 2-bedroom apartment (3 rooms) of the same size as we lived in before in Sweden. To our disappointment not all the boxes was nicely packed, the last minute packing resulted in some half-full boxes as well as paper bags. We had better just do the work with getting everything into boxes, which will be nicer for the moving company (don't think they will move anything to the moving truck that is just lying around).

Maria showed up not to be resistant to the Swedish viruses, as she caught a cold and had a runny nose for several days (weeks).

During these days we transferred the hours we've filmed in the States from bands to external hard disk. Our laptop doesn't have the required connections, but now we can edit it later.

A nice reunion

The first week back in Sweden was spent in northern Småland, the area of Sweden where Maria's parents and two siblings lives.
When we stayed a few nights at Maria's sister a lot of time was focused around horses, what else can you expect when the family has five horses on their own. This included walking the youngest horses, as well as riding them (yes, Maria tried for a short while, even if her young niece was much much better).
The following days in her parent's house were when we started to collect our belongings. Most of the fabrics (towels, linen, old clothes) as well as glasses/porcelain have been stored in their house. We just had to try to find them in the wardrobes and attic.

Old traditions as sauna on Friday evenings were also brought to live again. A nice wood-burning sauna is never wrong, you feel so clean afterward.
On the Saturday all of Maria's family had a reunion, at the same time Olof's parents showed up in order to bring us and our belongings with them later in the day. A nice big family dinner and so nice to spend time with the niece and nephews that have grown so much these two years we have been away.