Posted in Yada Yada | | Archive | 35 Comments »

Today is my birthday and I’m now twenty-seven years old. I like the sound of that. Twenty-seven. It sounds rather grown up don’t you think? Good thing it does because I don’t look grown up and quite often I don’t act like I am either.

It’s 1 AM and I’m at my parents house. They’re coming home today after spending eighteen days in the northern Sweden visiting relatives. I’ve been spending a lot of time here while they’ve been gone, watching their 90 channel cable TV, downloading stuff with their fast internet, enjoying berries straight from their garden, eating their food and ice cream.

I’m not sure whether we’ll celebrate me today or tomorrow. Depends on what time they’re home and how tired they are I guess. The fridge is rather empty and unless they pick up a cake on the way home there’s nothing suitable for a birthday celebration in the house.

I’ll be back with a blog post once I’ve got my presents. It’ll be another “look at my new stuff”-post which I’ve been so fond of lately.

Plugs: Sam, Angie, Rachel-Rebecka, Nadia, adastra, Ashley, Deanna, Olivia H., Malin, Veronica, Marina, Grace, Tin, Becca, Sean, Trina, Lady, tiff k, Rachel, Erica, kitty, Wayne John, Justin, Ashley, Arwen, Fatima, Shaina, Alyssa, Ria, Karin, Nikkole, Pim, Isa, Afef, Melle

Posted in Yada Yada | Tags: Summer, The Hultsfred festival, | Archive | 5 Comments »

Hello there!

Time flies and I’m surprised at how fast! It’s been three weeks since I last blogged but it doesn’t feel like it. I guess it’s because it’s summer and this time of the year time moves way too fast. It’s now it should move slowly, it’s now that you should be able to feel every moment, look at the time and think “Only one hour passed since I last looked, it feels like five!”. But of course the only time when that happens is when life is boring, in the middle of the winter when we’re stuck at work or doing something else equally boring. I can’t believe July is coming to an end. How on earth is that possible?! Summer will be over in about a month and I feel like it was May yesterday! This is such a horror to me since spring and summer is the only time of the year when I’m truly happy. Like I’ve told you before I can’t cope with the darkness of fall and winter. Seasonal affective disorder is a bitch and living in a country where fall and winter takes up half the year isn’t ideal. Because of this I’ll try to make the very best out of what’s left of summer. I’ll spend more time outside, take longer walks and pay closer attention to the beauty of nature – while it lasts. And I have bigger things than that to make something out of the remainder of summer since I’m going to Stockholm to see a friend and then on a cruise with my family in early August.

Since I last blogged the big thing that has happened was “Hultsfred-ändå-festivalen” (The Hultsfred anyway festival) as I call it. You might remember that I blogged about the fact that the Hultsfred festival was cancelled but that people were coming here anyway. Well they did. I’m not sure how many but at least 200 people came to Hultsfred, stayed at the camping (which is part of what used to be the festival area), partied and had fun as if the festival had never been cancelled. Of course there was a big difference. Instead of six stages with some of the biggest bands in the world there was a travel trailer with a sound system and local bands playing in the grass in front of it. Sure, the festival was smaller than it had ever been before but the energy was the same just as the attitude of the people. No, the attitude was even better. Here were people who came to Hultsfred without the big rock festival. Not many people except for German tourist do so because this is a really small and really boring town. But here they were anyway, determined to not let the festival go without a proper goodbye. I love them for that.

Plugs: adastra, Anna, Angie, Deanna, alisha

Posted in Yada Yada | Tags: Hultsfred, The Hultsfred festival, | Archive | 2 Comments »

Yesterday was a day of great sorrow in my home town and today isn’t much better. The Hultsfred festival that’s been arranged here for twenty-four years has been cancelled due to not enough tickets being sold this year. Three years ago this was the biggest rock festival in Sweden with more than 30 000 tickets sold but after two years of only around 20 000 tickets sold and this years only 5000 they cancel the festival. After loosing money for two years they found it impossible to arrange a festival that would mean loss of money for the third year in a row and yesterday declared their bankruptcy.

An era of music, fun and party in Hultsfred has come to a end. This is sad for everyone who visited the festival but especially for us who live here. Hultsfred is a small town with only 5000 inhabitants and the festival was pretty much the only thing going on here. This is what Hultsfred is known for. This was what was good about living in this town. This was the thing you looked forward to every year. But no more.

There’s a Facebook group called “Vi som åker till Hultsfred ändå!” (We who are going to Hultsfred anyway!) though. It’s a group for people who are planning to come here to camp and party anyway, even though there’s no festival. I’m obviously a member of the group and I’m looking forward to participating in some kind of party during this weekend and next week. Like I said, no festival is especially sad for us who live here so it’s wonderful that people are still coming here. It would have been horrible with a week of absolutely nothing going on when there was supposed to have been a big festival taking place. Of course this will be nothing like what the festival would have been but at least it’s something. A last hurrah.

To those who made the festival possible: Thank you for the five wonderful years of festival fun I was lucky to be a part of. I will miss it a lot.

Plugs: kitty, Zanna

Posted in Yada Yada | Tags: Movies, Sweden, TV, USA, | Archive | 9 Comments »

On the IMBD forums I’ve seen a lot of people in favour or American re-makes because they think they’re easier to follow than subtitled movies in the original for them foreign language. There’s also many countries (Most of central and southern Europe) that dub just about everything in another language than their native one. For me as a Swede I have a hard time understanding what they find so difficult about subtitles. Sure in some less developed countries where a large percentage of the population can’t read it’s one thing but when Americans prefer re-makes and French and Germans dubbed movies it’s just silly. Personally my reading skills were good enough to follow subtitles when I was seven and it’s been working well for me ever since.

I think it’s especially silly when people (Americans, it’s always Americans) complain about how it’s hard to follow a movie in a language they don’t understand with subtitles they do understand. Personally I think it’s harder to follow a movie in a language you do understand with subtitles in another language you also understand.

The things is no matter how good the subtitles are not everything can be accurately translated. Take humorous puns like this for example: “What did the grape say when it got stepped on? Nothing – but it let out a little whine”. Translated to Swedish the words “whine” and “wine” have no similarity to each other which means that directly translated the joke no longer makes sense. The usual solution to this is replacing the joke with a similar one. It works but when you understand the spoken English and get the joke it’s a bit annoying reading a completely different joke in the Swedish subtitles. That is what you could call hard to follow. Hearing one thing in one language and reading another in another language. Yet here in Sweden where almost everyone understand English we don’t complain because we’re used to this.

What do I want to say with this? That people who think subtitles makes movies hard to follow should think about how we do it in Sweden and how we manage well despite the fact that most of us understand both the spoken language and the subtitled one. Dubbing makes movies look weird and re-makes… well isn’t that just extremely unnecessary? Just read the damn subtitles.

Plugs: Ashley, Becky, Cecilie, Karin, Rhea, alisha, Erin, Veronica, maria

Posted in Computers & Internet, Yada Yada | Tags: Web Design, | Archive | 12 Comments »

Once again I’m sorry about the fact that I once again have neglected my blog, once again not because I’ve been busy but once again because I just haven’t felt like blogging. Once again I promise I’ll try to blog more often but once again it’s very likely that won’t happen. So, with all that said, hello friends, foes, stalkers and random unfortunate who somehow ended up here after googleing something odd, did you miss me?!

After not blogging for weeks I should probably start this with an update on what I’ve been doing. I’ll summarize it for you: fear of cancer and too many doctor’s appointments, angst about money, web design, a bit of shopping, taking long walks on beautiful summer’s days and being depressed inside on rainy summer days when all I want is to take long walks on beautiful summer’s days. I’ll now explain everything in detail.

1. Fear of cancer and too many doctor’s appointments
Like two months ago I discovered a lump above the knee on my right leg. I googled the problem and read that basically either it wasn’t dangerous at all or cancer. Being someone who’s not easily scared of course I assumed what I had wasn’t dangerous at all. Hahaha yeah right… I immediately assumed I had cancer which led to the conclusion that I was dying. Knowing that I was dying I imagined saying my farewells to my family, cried and then started imagining (planning) my funeral. After deciding on the ceremony, music and type of flowers to lay on my casket I cried myself to sleep that night. Eventually I went to see a nurse who sent me to a doctor who sent me to another doctor at the county hospital. Turns out it’s just fatty tissue, one of those nice tumours that does no harm. Obviously this was great news and I immediately stopped planning my funeral.

2. Angst about money
I’ve been a university student since January. It’s a well known fact that it’s now June. That means school is over for this term and so is my student loan for this term. This leaves me without a income and that means I’ll live on government welfare money this summer. I’m not sure exactly how much (little) I’ll get but it will be a few hundreds of dollars less than what I’m used to. I’m trying hard to focus on the bright side of this which is that at least I get welfare money which means I get to keep my apartment and don’t have to sell my computer, body or left kidney to feed myself. Alright I wouldn’t have to sell my left kidney if I didn’t get these money but I would have had to move back to my family’s house. That would be traumatic for both me and my family. Traumatic for me because I’m almost 27 years old and have lived on my own for four years and traumatic for them because I’m almost 27 years old and they thought they got rid of me for good when I moved out of their house four years ago. Anyway, that was the bright side of this situation; I get to keep my apartment. Unfortunately focusing on it is hard when there’s also a not so bright side which is the fact that I won’t be able to afford a vacation this summer. Bye bye bike vacation on Öland! T_T

3. Web design
Since I’m being witty about things that I in reality find no humour in it’s only logic that I’ll be dead serious about things that I’m happy about. So here we go, here’s me not being witty but serious. I recently finished a web design commission I’ve been working on for a while. It’s a site for the town’s karate club. I got the job because two of my siblings are active within the club but that doesn’t mean I can’t take pride in it. This is the first time I’m doing a web design job for people I don’t know because obviously there are more people in the club than my siblings. They liked it and I feel very accomplished. Take a look at it here: www.whirlwind.nu/1 As you can see the layout is still located on my domain since I want to finish a few small changes before I upload it to theirs.

4. A bit shopping
You know what, I’ll leave this to another blog post. Partly because I don’t have the energy to edit photos right now but mostly because that means I’ll have something to write about in my next blog post.

5. Taking long walks on beautiful summer’s days
Say what you want about Hultsfred but during summer several areas of town are quite beautiful.

6. Being depressed inside on rainy summer days when all I want is to take long walks on beautiful summer’s days
And say what you want about Hultsfred but on rainy summer days most areas of town are quite depressing since grey skies and rain makes an alredy depressing excuse of a town look even more like a depressing excuse of a town.

Plugs: Anna, Cecilie, Aly, Lady, Amber, Cierrah, Maria, Malin, Mallory, Angie, kitty, Julie

Posted in Yada Yada | | Archive | 9 Comments »

Hello dear friends, strangers, stalkers and whoever else might read this!

Yes, I’ve done it again. Totally neglected my blog. I haven’t neglected the site though. The reason to my absence is that I’ve focused on getting my Ego gallery with self-portraits up and running again, which took me about two weeks. I’ve gone through thousands of photos dating back to 2001, picked out and edited more than 700 of them, then re-edited half of them because I came up with a better way to fix sharpness and finally coded more than 300 pages for the gallery. So yeah, all that took a while to do.

The gallery is set up in the same way as the old one used to be. There’s a big difference in the coding but that’s not something you’ll notice. What you’ll notice is that the photos are much bigger. The old ones were a pitiful 320×240 px while the new ones are 500×375 px. That means you can now actually see the colour of my eyes in the photos, for example. There’s still some very small photos in the gallery which I don’t have in a bigger size but I came up with a somewhat satisfying solution to that. See the first half of 2004 and you’ll see what I mean.

Anyway, if you check out the gallery please let me know if something’s not working like it should or not looking quite right. I might not look quite right in some photos but please ignore that. That’s all good. I just happen to be quite a weirdo and quite a poser at times. And by “at times” I mean whenever there’s a camera near. There’s basically two kinds of photos of me. 1. I’m doing a weird face. 2. I’m doing some pose which I at the time thought made me look cool or pretty.

Oh well, that’s it for now. Don’t expect me back on the blog scene just yet. I might be done with one gallery but there’s two more (Photo Blog + Art) to go.

Plugs: Nikkole, Becca, Cecilie, Angie, Alyssa, Afef, tiff k, Beara, Julie

Posted in Yada Yada | | Archive | 26 Comments »

Every day is a gift. I need to work on seeing it that way. Not that every day is a curse, it’s just that I take everything for granted. Don’t we all? If you knew you’d die tomorrow, wouldn’t you wish you had appreciated life more? I’m not depressed and I don’t hate my life but I’m not happy with it either and because of that I’ve always lived more in the future than the present. That if anything is taking life for granted. Walking through life set on how wonderful things will be one day, seeing the present as nothing but a road to get there. Others do the opposite. They think back on how lovely things used to be and doesn’t realize memories tend to change with time and eventually make everything that was seem better than what is. How silly, since the past is over and the future uncertain. The only thing we really have is today but that’s so easy to forget. I will try not to.

Plugs: Veronica, Sean, Joebs, Shaina, Mimi, Angie, milla, Kimeh, silvia, Mallory, Anna, Chiui, Aly, Lotte, Alyssa, Ashley, Regan, Deanna, kitty, Cecilie, Joy, Lady, Mihoriel, Wyther Wyskers, Nikkole

Posted in Yada Yada | Tags: Fucking shit, My home, | Archive | 12 Comments »

So once again I’ve neglected my blog. This time it’s not because I’ve been busy but because I’ve been very upset and had a lot on my mind due to tons of drama. I won’t go into details because contrary to some I don’t bring my offline drama online or trash talk others in my blog. Ignoring and not retaliating something like that isn’t easy but I refuse to sink to such a low level. So, before I let myself get carried away with anger and do just that let’s leave this subject and move on.

All three new lamps I’ve bought (online) have arrived and I love how they’ve added elegance to my home. I took new photos of my home yesterday. Of all rooms but the bathroom since the only thing that ever changes there is the beauty products on the shelves and the colours of the towels. My bathroom is really hopeless. There’s just not enough space so it gives a messy impression even though it’s in perfect order. Anyway, you can view the photos of my home here.

And I’m ending this post with something I wish everyone would realize. Calling someone else a slut doesn’t make you a saint. It does however make you a bitch.

Plugs: Maria, Jennifer, Aly, Elizabeth, Holly, Amanda, Wattle, Cecilie, maria, tiff k, Karin, Angie

Posted in Yada Yada | Tags: School, Twitter, | Archive | 10 Comments »

Hello guys!

I just thought I’d let you know that no, I’m not dead. My lack of blogging and activity on the blog scene is due to dealing with a lot of school work. Expect me back some time next week.

I am still active on Twitter though. Follow me there if you like: http://twitter.com/cherienoir. Yeah, I made a new account. If you’ve been following my old one (B147CH) please follow my new one instead.

Plugs: Kristen, kitty, milla, Deanna, Mallory, Isa, Belinda, Ann, Angie, Jennifer

Posted in Yada Yada | Tags: My home, | Archive | 23 Comments »

I often complain about how I hate living in a small town but never talk about what’s good about. Because believe it or not, it’s not all bad.

In Sweden housing shortage is a big problem. At least when it comes to affordable apartments. Young people with low incomes need patience, luck or connections to find a place to live with a decent rent. Many live with their parents, with friends or rent an apartment “second hand”. I don’t know how to translate it properly but I’ll try to explain. Person X’s name is on the lease but person X won’t be able to live in his/her apartment for a while, because he/she is travelling the world for a year or whatever. So while person X is away you rent the place – from person X, not the landlord. Since you have to move out whenever person X wants the apartment back this obviously isn’t the best way to live. Still it’s the way many young Swede’s live since it’s very hard to get your hands on a affordable apartment with a “first hand lease”.

It’s a lot easier in a small town though. For me it was ridiculously easy. The first apartment I was offered to have a look at is the apartment I live in today. In one day I found out there was a vacant apartment with a low rent, got the keys to have a look at it, saw and loved it and finally signed the lease. I realize I’ve been very lucky because this is not the way it usually goes.

Right now I’m looking for an apartment in Gothenburg, the second biggest city in Sweden. They e-mail me whenever there’s an apartment available that suits me. So I get an e-mail once in a while and always let them know I’m interested in whichever apartment’s available. About 3000 others do the same. Yep, that’s the usual number of people interested in each apartment available. No wonder I’m not having any luck because there’s no real queue system in Gothenburg. They just choose whoever “suits the apartment best”. Whoever has the highest income I bet. Because really, when you have 3000 people to choose from obviously you prefer a tenant with a good income rather than some poor student living off a student loan.

At least I have a home of my own. In the wrong place but it’s still a home, which I love. My apartment may be small but it was renovated in 2004 so everything is new and looks good. Not to mention that three out of four rooms are blue! My favourite colour when it comes to home decoration! The only things I’d like to change is the colour of the kitchen cupboards, the kitchen floor and the hallway floor. Other than that everything is perfect. It’s my home sweet home.

Plugs: Nikkole, Jennifer, maria, Maria, Deanna, Mallory, Shaina, Karin, Alyssa, Angie, Chiui, Kristine, Ashley, Malin, Sean, tiff k, Natasha, Daniella, Aly, Tiaralynn, Cecilie, Pim