Sverige

Hello and welcome to a blog post from Sweden. I'm sitting in our kitchen, at the kitchen table. The boy is cooking some pasta that we bought at a market hall thing yesterday. Two different types, one with walnuts in the pasta and stuffed with cheese and the others made with normal pasta and a different type of cheese. We have a couple of candles burning and it's been raining all day.

Welcome to Sweden!

But it's not that bad. I'm not sure what to say about Sweden just yet. It's cold, (yay!), it's very ordered, it's full of people who speak English well. Our apartment is a studio, but has a kitchen with room for a table that sits 6 and two full sized fridge/freezer things. Our bed is tiny for a double or large for a single, we haven't quite worked that out. We can't work out how to turn the heating down, and it's really quite warm in the flat, somewhere around 25 degrees, which is far to warm for sleeping purposes. We don't know where our rubbish goes, or whether we have a storage room. But, we do know how to book the laundry in the building and it's about two doors down from our flat. So we're pretty well set up.

There's a supermarket 2 mins walk from the flat, a lolly shop across the road, a fruit and veg shop + deli as well. We have a 7-11 nearby too. I can walk to work in about 10 minutes (uphill) and we're about 15-20 mins stroll from the centre of town.

Hmm, what else? We've still not found out what the rent will be on this flat. We don't have a bank account. But hey, we've only been here for 2 days.

Okay, I'd better go, the pasta is almost ready and I should probably go and see if the boy needs any help.

By the way, my English has gone to shit since we arrived. I think it's because I'm trying my darndest to learn as much Swedish as possible. So all my nouns have gone missing from my brain. Apologies for the wandering manner of this post and my potentially shitehouse English from now on. Better get that thesis finished!

Less than a week to go

So I'm currently visiting my Opa who is on his last week of chemo and radiation therapy. It's likely that while this may help and completely reduce the tumour (10%), the more likely scenario is that he will have a smaller tumour removed surgically later. But we'll find out about that in March. Otherwise he's doing okay. He doesn't like to eat too much because it results in pain at the other end. He's lost 10kgs and Oma has lost 5 due to the lack of full meals. But there he's still relatively positive, even if he does whinge a bit. My brother and I drove up from Melbourne last night and were amazed by the destruction we saw from the Hume, brought by the bushfires. It was amazing how much was burnt and how much smoke there still was in the air.

P (the brother) has managed, through working and playing too hard, to get himself a dose of flu. He's got a fever, sore throat, headache, sinus pain etc etc. So he's currently napping again, after a full day of napping. I didn't realise how sick he was on the drive up though, until we stopped for some food at a 'crap in a box' chain restaurant and he was saying how cold he was, but was burning up. It's a trip to the doctor tomorrow. Poor bugger.

To the topic of today's post, less than a week to go. This time next week I'll be on a plane, somewhere (I think) between Hong Kong and Helsinki. I would love to say that tomorrow I'm flying to Canberra to submit my thesis. But alas, this is not the case. What is the case is that I will have two full drafts of my thesis completed and submitted to my supervisor by Friday the 20th of February. As ever, the thesis is taking longer than expected. I have made significant changes to the original documents and it currently sits at about 30, 000 words of thesis goodness. I'm hopeful that it really will be only 1 more draft and then I can submit. I would have loved to be finished by now, but I hope that by submitting later I might actually pass. Updates no doubt to come soon.

I think I shall now go and do a little bit of work on the thesis while Opa watches the news.