This morning I was awake at 09.00. I found a nice bottle of reisling, chilled it for 2 hours. made some banana bread, set my iTunes to play random jazz and i am still enjoying the day 🙂

Tonight I might go to dinner and a movie with Robin. I don’t know yet.

Was supposed to visit with Markus and go out afterwards last night, but Markus had other plans he couldn’t avoid and so we didn’t meet. More on that another time in the friend’s area of my LJ.

Went out to Lino on my own, but forgot my VIP card so I just decided to come back home and stay home. The rest was quite nice.

Still must study today for my CISSP exam in 2 weeks. I am nervous, but with the holiday week this week and the less stressful workload the week after, I have lots of study time to make something happen. I really need to pass this exam. I don’t need to, but I really want to.

Happy Sunday to everyone! 🙂

Hello everyone!

Hope that everyone is doing well. It has just been such an exhausting 2 or 3 weeks since I last wrote. In that time, I have been to Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo, and Berlin at different points in time. We had a major deadline to reach, but I think that we have done it. So that was a good thing.

Work was dramatic, home has been dramatic, life has been hectic. I want to take a real vacation but can’t. Can’t seem to get a loan to buy an apartment in Sweden, so I might have to rent. Can’t seen to get anyone to rent to an American, so I might have to sleep on the street. All of this, and then there are lots of things happening at work that are sapping my energy.

I am physically and emotionally exhausted at the moment. Each day I don’t know what causes me to go on.

But it’s warm enough to rain today in stockholm and the sun is trying. And I relaxed at home yesterday watching The Birdcage and the “Gay ” episode of Ab Fab which is always funny. An Monday I get my hairs cut.

Yay for me!

For those who don’t know….the last time I visited my original dentist, she broke a drill bit in my tooth while doing a root canal. That was not a fun experience. She couldn’t remove it so she sent me to their specialist clinic.

Well after 2 appointments spread over 3 hours, they finally managed to remove the drill bit so that they could continue on with the original root canal as scheduled.

I can’t tell you how happy that makes me actually. My dental insurance runs out on 31 May 2006, so I have between now and May to finish up the root canal and get 50-80% of the cost for that reimbursed. Then, it’s just simple maintenance work from that point on. I will warn my dentist that if she can’t finish by 15 May 2006, that I would rather use two dentists to make sure that the work gets completed. No sense in paying full price for something I should be getting a discount on.

Oh yeah, and I am at the airport right now. Getting plastered. I am in the SAS EuroBonus Gold lounge and I am a bit drunk. 5 glasses of reisling will do that to you. But hey, I have got to celebrate being able to make progress on my tooth, right? It’s the last piece of dental work I need before my mouth returns back to some semblance of normal.

And finally…it’s another busy travel week. I will be in Denmark tonnight, Helsinki tomorrow night, and then coming back to Stockholm on Friday to go to Berlin on Saturday for a long weekend. I deserve it. I have been good this year.

I have been wondering for a few days now what the future direction of my LJ should be. I decided that I won’t get rid of it, because I like it first as a tool for me and second that it provides a forum to share.

However, I have looking at several journals over the weekend and I am not sure what to do. Some journals are chalk full of text, and that is a positive and a negative because no one but your closest friends reads that text. Other journals have lots of pictures, but not lots of text. And still I see some on the middle. But the asthetics aren’t the only thing. I have been thinking a lot about content too. Some people post only happy things, others post everything good and bad. And still others turn it into a real experience through several forms of expression and media. There isn’t a right answer really and I know this. But that is my dilemma. I will continue to look at this journals that I think are more reflective of the style I want to move towards and come to some conclusion.

I know I want to add more pictures, but I am not sure I want to be the focus of them as opposed to how I see the world. I want to share my stories and stuff, but within what I feel are the correct contexts.

For the moment I will leave my journal as is. But I will probably change it over in june. to what i don’t know…

So the weekend in review…this weekend I decided to stay in Stockholm. Which was an OK thing to do.

On Friday I hung out with Markus. That was very nice. We hadn’t hung out together for ages. However, something went really wrong on Friday. All of the alcohol made me really sick and I had to leave without warning. Luckily I did not get sick on Saturday, but I didn’t feel good for most of the day.

On Saturday I just decided to take it easy. I was supposed to go to Lino to support Max who was beginning his first night as a bartender there. But I took a few shots at home to see what would happen. And sure enough, as I was walking out the door, I got violently ill. There could very well be something in the choices that I am making for drinks. I don’t know what to do, so I will avoid alcohol for the immediate future.

And today, it’s Sunday morning, and I am listening to jazz-influenced music. It’s really a tradition I had back in Boston. When I was away from home for so long, I often liked to spend Sunday morning listening to a radio station that played great jazz (Magic 106.7) and would just have a leisurely breakfast of something like scones and a latte while reading the papers or a good book and just spending a few hours disconnected from the world. Of course, I live in Sweden now, so replace the scone with knäckebröd och cheese, a youghurt drink, a piece of fruit, and CNN online. Funny how life is sometimes.

So last weekend I went to Prague. I decided to wait to post about it because I wanted to give it some time. Prague is about the only other capital city in Europe that I like more than Berlin. In Scandinavia, Copenhagen is the cosmopolitian capital. In the West, I would argue that Berlin actually matters more than London or Paris, whose main draw is accessibility and historical charm. Prague is the capital of the East. I like Prague because even though I was there in 2001, and just went back last weekend, it is clearly still a capital in transition. It is gritty and raw and beautiful and inspiring at the same time. That’s the best way I can describe it.

Anyway, I arrived on Friday early afternoon. I stayed at the renaissance hotel, which is a nice place and where I stayed last time. The hotel was nice. I wanted to immediately go and see the castle, but I got a call from work and that forced me to spend a few hours in front of the machine (now that I think about this, I’m going to charge them for the internet access for Friday). But after that, I went off to see the castle and take some pictures. The problem was that I forgot that I had left my memory sticks for my camera at home, so no pictures to show.

Anyway, on Friday night I went to see Brokeback Mountain. I then went out to a few bars and I had a really nice time at the bars. There was a problem on Friday, but that will be in the friends-only area.

On Saturday I did some shopping and walking around. It was a pretty good time. You would not believe just how cheap everything is in Prague. It’s like a sale on money! Got some alcohol from the shops because it’s 40-60% less than in Stockholm. Forget for a moment that I have 75 liters of alcohol of various types — a bargain is a bargain. Met up with a really cool guy named Alec on Saturday. It was cool to hang out with him. We went to a club and I hung out for awhile until I got really drunk and left without saying goodbye. oops! (sorry Alec). But he’s really cool so we’ll keep in touch I am sure.

On Sunday, I had a nice and lazy day. No rush to go anywhere except to the airport. When you pass through customs and immigration, there’s the Czech Airlines tax-free shop. A mecca of everything a human wants that is bad for them. Eager for more bargains, I purchased more….alcohol. Including absynth. Sigh. So now I have bags and bags of stuff. ANd as usual, when I landed in Stockholm, I hold my bags of booze up in front of customer and yell “Kiss My Ass, Systembolaget.” The corresponding strip searches and urine samples are small prices to pay for those 4 seconds of glory.

So anyhoo. I have lots of good reasons to go back to Prague, including an unspent €300 SAS voucher 😉 So I will be back there in late-April, early-May

So I passed out due to the bottle of wine i drank. now i am awake early and tired.

oh well, at least i am going to Prague today 🙂