The little doggie's mistress went into the Chinese restaurant under my apartment, and he cried all the time until she came back ... He looks like a mix between border collie and German shepherd (or something).

Mihai nicely matches the pictures with scenes from alpinism and skiing that he bought at the flea market as a present for Gusti.

Yesterday, me and Mihai ate some of the Swedish traditional food surströmming - fermented Baltic herring. I had never tried it before, only felt the terrible smell once when some people thought it would be funny to open a can of surströmming in the hallway in school. Mihai wanted to try it, and the more I told him about how bad it smelled, the more determined he became.


Mihai has just pierced a hole in the can, and has experienced the smell, which already has contaminated his fingers beyond immediate repair.

We went to the park and sat down on a bench by the brook. The wind was luckily somewhat strong, but the smell was still quite ... interesting.





The fish looked quite harmless compared to its smell.



It tasted weird. Very strong, salty and sour. It made the tongue weirdly numb. We ate it with polarkaka, though you're actually "supposed to" eat it with either potatoes and onion or tunnbröd and butter. Well, close enough.



While we were eating, an older man walked by, and as the smell hit him, he just had to ask if it really was surströmming we were eating. He was very happy that young people today still do that - it's "real culture"! For him, it had taken a while before he had learned to love it, but once convinced, he had converted all his family to the delight of surströmming.



Well, after finishing as much as we could (me 1, Mihai 4 herrings), we went back home, still smelling.

Last weekend, I helped Mihai pick some new (okay, second-hand) shirts at Erikshjälpen (he forced me to do it). It then struck me how easy it is to dress nicely for (some) men (excluding those nasty metrosexuals): a shirt and a pair of pants, with a sweater over the shirt in the winter. Somewhat loose pants accentuate nicely shaped private parts while being comfortable to wear. The same goes for loose shirts that drape themselves nicely over your torso.

As for me, loose pants tend to look pretty nasty on me. In the rare cases where that's not the case, I still can never seem to find fitting shoes to wear with them. (All shoes I own are either meant for tight pants, skirts or the summer.) As for shirts and pullovers, I have to think much more about what I wear with what. Loose clothes are out of the question, unless they are loose in such a way that they still accentuate my boobs ...

Alas, when I was young, I used to cross-dress as a man. I always wore pants (well, *tight* pants), a shirt, and a sweater over the shirt in colder seasons. The pants were tight, but I never had to think much about what to wear to school. It was so much easier also because all of my wardrobe was black, with the occasional red and military green addition.

Yes, I never bothered much about stupid little things like clothes. I'm sure I would never have written a blog entry about clothes back then ...

So why am I doing it now?!?! Dammit, I've let myself slip! More colours have snuck into my wardrobe! I'm spending five seconds instead of just one fussing about what to wear when I'm going out!!! What an immense waste of time and resources!!

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Anyway, I'm quite happy about moving back to my own apartment in Kävlinge this Friday. Yay, Internet at home! Yay, all my books! Yay, my kitchen! Yay, washing machines that actually work! Yay, floor heating! (I.e. badly isolated heating pipes that run under my floor.)

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I recently discovered that it's actually possible to borrow magazines at the city library. You get to keep a whole year's worth of Bang or ETC for two weeks. Two excellent magazines. (I'm even starting to wish secretly that I could work for them ...)

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Tack vare Bang har jag upptäckt Kristina Sandbergs roman "Insekternas sång", som mot bakgrund av ett ridläger beskriver existentiella teman och uppväxtproblematik.

Jag har inte kommit så värst långt än, men den väcker hur som helst obehagligt igenkännande av den extrema gruppförnedring det kan innebära att gå på ridskola. Jag har själv upplevt det, och det var först när jag var medryttare på en av min grannes hästar och kunde spränga omkring ensam i skogarna som jag blev av med den krypande tudelade känsla som jag så länge hade förknippat med ridning: ömsom glädje och stolthet över att vara i samspel med dessa gigantiska muskelberg, och ömsom självförakt och förnedring, för vad man än gjorde var det så klart för det mesta helt fel (enligt ridläraren och alla andra). Och om de berömde en någon gång eller i en sällsynt svag stund försvarade en mot nån annan ragata var man så tacksam att man ville kyssa marken de gick på.

Varför skrivs det inte mer böcker om ridskole-erfarenheter? De kan ju blotta så mycket spännande saker i mänsklig psykologi. Och de flesta tjejer iallafall har ju ändå gått något år på ridskola, så det är en erfarenhet som ganska många delar.

And the same street from a slightly different angle, with a flock of birds flying across the sky:

I got the idea from Brian Hiltz.

My face is extremely asymmetrical (for instance - why does only half of my mouth smile when I smile?!), so this had to be interesting. The camera was a bit too close to my face, so it was a bit distorted in a slightly fish eye way, but you can still see how the two halves of my face seem to have whole different personalities ...



Mihai always teases me about my lopsided nose and claims he has a very nice and symmetrical face. Turns out he really does, so I had to choose a picture where his face is lighted from the side to make it interesting. Now it looks like he has one good and one evil twin! He he.

When I left Orust, the cool sea was steaming in the warm morning sun, spreading fog over parts of the island.

I'm right now reading "The Good Terrorist" by Doris Lessing, where a bunch of wannabe revolutionaries squat a big old dilapidating house, and the main character works hard to make the house fit for living in. Some elements of that book seem to have snuck into my dream last night.

I was riding on the bus, and a woman dressed like a Finnish Gypsy sat down next to me. She didn't have any ticket, but I helped her avoid getting a fine when the controller came (I don't remember how, but it was in any case successful). The woman was happy, and started to talk with me. We had a lot of things in common, and we got along quite well, beyond the superficial level. When I mentioned that I was looking for a place to stay, and was getting pretty desperate, she invited me to come stay with her family in the big uninhabited mansion they were about to settle in. They had already arranged all formalities with the municipalities and were in their full right to live there - the only possible problem was that the house wasn't in the best of shapes.

I agreed, and came along to look at the place. It was a very old house that had been a quite amazing building once. On the entrance floor, there were two kitchens in pretty good shape, a gigantic dining hall with amazing ornaments in the roof, a room with the entire walls covered with yellow mosaic tiles, and three bedrooms with deep blue walls with two adjacent bathrooms.

I was subconsciously looking for a room for myself, and these bedrooms were so close to each other that I assumed they would be much better suited for members of the woman's large and noisy family. So, I climbed the broad stairs with their soft chestnut wood railings to the second floor.

It was in slightly worse condition - there was a big hole in the floor in the middle of the big hallway, and, well, for some reason the hallway was full of hay, like a hay loft (?!). But there were a couple of rooms that were in quite good shape. What's more, they seemed to be somehow built of parts from ships (this must have been inspired by the Moomin house built by Tuulikki Pietilä, Pentti Eistola and Tove Jansson). It was quite clear to me that it had to be one of these rooms.

Before I could decide which one, I spotted a very old woman through a hole in a wall. I went to her to introduce myself, and she was overjoyed that someone was finally moving in. She had been the house-keeper for the people who lived there before, and didn't have any place to go when they moved out and fired her, so she stayed in the house. She was chattering on happily and wanted to convince me to let her be my housekeeper, when the woman who was the actual new owner came in. The old woman took one look at her Gypsy clothes and her swarthy children running around, and she was suddenly ice cold. My new friend was quite used to this kind of stuff happening, and acted like she didn't mind much, while I tried my best to make the old woman soften up and see the people behind the appearance. Still, the old woman wasn't sure whether she still wanted to be our house-keeper, but we assured that she would of course get to stay in the house, like she always had.

Then, one of the children almost fell into the big hole in the floor, and we were barely able to rescue him. After he had calmed down, we had some dinner, and while I was helping my new friend wash the dishes afterwards, she started to complain about this everlasting discrimination she was facing, and how she saw no way out of it. I said I thought the old house-keeper would warm up by and by, and that everything would be all right, but my thoughts were already drifting towards the rooms on the second floor again - I still hadn't chosen which one would be my room ...

Then I woke up.

Mitsu doesn't want to let Sergei on the porch.