Finally friday!

Since I love my job at Voxbiblia I am more of the happy monday type than the finally friday man. But tomorrow I will be spending 7 hrs with one of the finest chocolatier we have in Sweden. Maybe one of the best over all. His name is Emanuel Andrén and his exquisite handmade luxury chocolate pralines is just little pieces of heaven. They were a part of 2008 Grammy Awards giftbags and more importantly a part of mine and Noas tradition of a chocolate piece after lunch every friday. If you ever get the chance of eating one of his hand painted masterpieces you have to. It is well worth it.

Tomorrow I and 6 others will get to spend the entire day with him and learn how to do some of his magic. I signed up for it as soon as I heard about it but it wasn’t set when it was going to happen until very recently so it came as a happy surprise it was this weekend.

I have 7 dinner guests tomorrow evening and I guess they wont complain about the truffles I will bring back home in the evening.

I’m so exited!

I need to work a little bit more today and will leave you by fulfilling my promise: Images of the two most recent cakes I made. Both bday cakes to my wonderful friend Carola. I wish I took the time to take better photos of my cakes. But the time are rarely on my side when I bake.

Happy weekend!

Just another Thursday

Hello my most wonderful lovies! Yes, I am one of the many listeners of the very lovable auntie Vera Charles. Whenever I feel a bit down on my way to work (I am a morning downer) I listen to one of hir shows and always feel better.

Being newly wed, newly boss, a triduple-time parent and a tad lazy the blogging is as you know a very neglected part of my life. I wont apologize since this is my blog and my rules of frequency applies.

Right now I am waiting for a cake to bake in my oven. My very dear friend Carola have a birthday fika Saturday and I have gotten the honor of baking the cake. If you don’t tell her I can say that it will be two cakes. I couln’t help myself.

I believe most people are best in something. Most people have that area in life where they are the best. Someone have some mean programming skills, someone can retell a story in one sentence, someone knows all star wars lego sets in numerical order. Most people are the best at something.

I am the kind of person that isn’t. I am the kind of person that knows a lot about more things than the most. I know more about the economical situation than most, but many know much, much more than me. I know more about chemistry than most people but many, many more knows much more than me. I know a lot about the Bible but many, many more knows much more than me. And so the story goes. But that story actually goes a long way. I do know a lot. It took me a few years to notice but finally I did. For a long time I only saw that I didn’t know the most about anything. I only saw the downside of that side of me. The other side of the coin is that I very easily learn a lot about a new topic and remember most of it for ever.

But even if I nowadays think that just that is one of my best sides I still want to be really, really good at something. For now I have chosen baking cakes as that part of myself. I thought about it for a while and I realized I needed to nerd out on a thing that wasn’t work related and also is creative and fun. So I rather strategical and crassly chose cakes. I knew nothing about baking when I chose this path. Now it has passed a few years and I am starting to get a hang of it. Many of my friends let the bday cake be baked by me and I also get a few friends of friends that pay me to bake them something.

It is fun to go out of character like this and really learn something even thought it isn’t my profession. To go out of character to learn something new is totally inside my character and learning a lot about most things.

Now the cake that was in the oven when I started to write this is cooled (probably freeze) out on my balcony and I need to take care of it.

I will post some pictures on theese cakes after Saturday when Carola have seen them.

Until then: Take care and much love to all of you! Extra love for all of you that kept my feed for all this time. You’re extraordinary and I really do love you all!

Until next time I’ll leave you with a wonderful music video:

Not divorced any more

No further explanations needed :)

The new me

Hi there.

I am finally in front to my new self again or how ever you say back to the old self when you don’t have an old self to go back to.

Five weeks ago I did my SRS and it has been a few hard weeks after that. I know it is almost unforgivable to say that you are a new person after SRS in the trans community and I’m not saying that one surgery suddenly change everything and 6 weeks ago I was someone completely different and that you can’t transition without SRS.

What I am saying is that me getting SRS is something I needed to do legally to change my F to M in the governmental database and to get an ID that state who I am. That is what I wanted to do and the SRS is mostly icing on the cake I was striving towards. I started to grow to become who I am now many years ago but it wasn’t until the papers with my new personnummer that gets me this new identity came I felt that this new me could take my first breath as the person I want to be. All of that is behind me now.

Or soonish anyways. I got a little multi-resistant bug that made me sick and it took four weeks and several different hospitals to get what was wrong and I have had the time to get to know 8 different kinds of opiates and have tried 9 kinds of antibiotics this last month. Finally the lab found the specific bacteria and now I have the right meds.

I am at home since a week and are feeling well and a couple of more days I will be done with this last cure and beginning to look like it will be good yule this year too.

Cause and a nice effect

When I left the evangelical part of my religious life I left many parts of myself behind me. I don’t know if this is one of those parts or if it just is an unavoidable part that just comes when you grow up no matter where you do it.

The part I am think of is appreciating people for who they are and not for what they represent. When I was The Good Christian Girl that was all I seemed to appreciate for but more frustratingly it was the different roles people around me succeeded to live up to I appreciated them for. I judged people according to how well I thought they lived up to the role I thought were they primary role in their life. It was very important to me that my partner was the perfect partner, my parents was critically reviewed based on my image of A Parent and how they lived up to that and so on for friends, colleagues, pastors and basically everyone I ever met.

When I stepped away from the environment where I fitted in to a scary place where I was the most unusual person everyone had ever met and didn’t fit any template for how someone should be I could finally step away from my bad habit of only judge people in that way and start appreciate people for just being nice people. In some ways I never got to know my partner, my parents, friends and others until way after I came out. I was mainly interested in such a small part of them.

I just spoke to my parents for a rather long while. I feel so good and re-energized when speak to them nowadays. When I try to get to know them and appreciate them for who they are as persons. They are very nice and likable persons in a way that I didn’t recognize when I compared them only to my model of perfect parents. But honestly? Who want’s anyone to be perfect? The only thing I think a perfect person around me would give me is angst over my imperfect sides. Being an imperfect child to two perfect parents would be exhausting. I very much prefer to be myself along with two nice people that I share both good and bad sides with.

I don’t know if I needed to get away from church to grow to this place but I am very pleased to be here.

Today I yelled to my middle daughter over having Lego on her floor. A perfectly reasonable thing for a six year old to have and I was tired after a week with migraines.

I remembered my father yell with almost the same words to me over Lego parts when I was 6 years and the old me would be freaked out of being an imperfect parent and having a daughter that I haven’t brought up perfectly. This more energy-effective environmentally safe me just feel a very strong bond towards both my daughter for being messy in the same way as me and to my dad for getting annoyed for the same semi-resonable minor things. Old me: Dissapointed, feeling desperately immutable and alone. New me: A part of something big, content with just getting to know people no matter how well or badly I perform.

So I smiled, helped my daugther to figure out a way to store her Lego that fits her way to play with it better than her previous way and then I called my father and chatted for a while.

I bet there are very few people missing old me anymore. If they do they just didn’t know her as well as I did.

Now I am off to sleep and hopefully I will yell less tomorrow. And write less self-absorbed blog post and clean this messy apartment up more.

Offensive pastries

When I did some treats with my son today I thought about my non Swedish readers and thought I would write a post to you.

Every single Swede instantly knows what is on the photo. It is probably the most common pastry we have. It is made with rolled oat/oat flakes, chocolate, coffee, sugar and butter. Rolled in nibsugar or coco flakes. Simple, delicious and beyond common.

Nowadays most kids know them as Chokladbollar, chocolate balls. But when I was young and to most old people and even in one of my cookbooks from 2001 has the traditional name Negerbollar. Yes. That would be the n-word balls in English. It is not at all strange if a christian lady in her 70’s asks for a couple of n*balls to her coffee. When I grew up it never occurd to me that the name could be offensive. In 2003 a person actually sued a bakery for ethical discrimination (denied though) by calling them negerbollar and since then all people selling them has change the name to Chokladbollar.

Herring, school and a lot of rules

Today my daughters had their big first roll call in school. Tomorrow they start school.

Over here kids start school the year they turn 6 in a preschool class that is not obligatory and then the year they turn 7 they start first class. My oldest starts first class and the six year old starts the preschool class. There is little difference besides the legality. I haven’t heard of any kid not starting at age of 6.

Right now I am taking a small break from the mountain of papers and forms we got today. One of the forms is a contract the kids sign that says that they will obey the school rules. Just as last year we will not sign them. The rules are as follows:

*I do my best and tries to be positive

*I do not violate others in word or action

*I respect everyone

*I behave politely and nicely in every situation in school

*I arrive in time and have the right equipment

*I behave in a way that no one is disturbed in their work

*I am careful with our school and keep our things in order

I have such a problem with letting a six and a seven year old signing a contract promising to follow all that. It is not because I want my kids to trash the school or disturb everyone else. But seriously, could you who read this follow all of these rules for a year in your workplace? To always respect everyone? To always do my best? I can try but to sign a contract that I would? I know I won’t do my best every hour of every day at work and will never expect that of a kid. So I am going to keep being the uncomfortable parent and not sign it this year too.

12-15 years ago I read a The Far Side comic strip about some one visiting Sweden and I don’t at all remember the joke but some part of it was that Sweden had a pickled herring for every season. I remember how I thought that was unfair. We didn’t have a special herring for every season. Several of the bigger holidays can be celebrated with the common pickled herring and we only have two pickled herrings that are bound to a certain season and one of them is fermented and not pickled. And we do have at least one big holiday when pickled herring isn’t an obligatory piece of food at the table.

It took me until this year to finally understand that our pickled herring habits made Gary Larson’s joke in The Far Side very reasonable. Most cultures does not have pickled herring to most of the holidays.

As long as I only spent time with other Swedes the omnipresent herring is rather odd. It is just not a prejudice. It really is everywhere. At the roll call today the kids also sang two songs and one of them is a song that every Swedish kids know with the title “Sill i Dill” with sill being pickled herring the title reads pickled herring in dill. When I came home I read the lunch menu(1) for the fall and on it in fine print it says that every time fish is served pickled herring is also served as an option.

Three or so years ago I saw my herrings as a part of the normative sides of myself. Now I have a broader perspective and see how it is something that many people regard as somewhat odd about my cuisine.

*Coming out as trans has forced me to take another perspective on a lot of things. I had to break up with my old faith and church and find new ground to stand on. With the new perspective i learned that the faith that I saw as the normal kind of christianity was in fact a very small fraction of how christianity is practiced.

*I placed myside outside of the standard core family and not until then I saw that most families isn’t just a mom, a dad and their two or three kids.

It is interesting to see how little of the normativity actually is common. But mostly: It just damn fine to grow up and form my own life according to my own likings.

Well, that’s my thoughts for today.

I suddenly feel an urge for pickled herring. Or even better fermented herring. But to be kind to you I fought my urge to put a pic of a delicious herring here and instead you got my son with some chocolate treats I made last week and a photo of a proud mother that lives here with us. I complain with all the work of three kids but she has about 50 young ones right now…

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(1) In our very fine school system all schools both private and public has free lunches for all kids until they end the 12th year of school. It has a very high standard in most places with high demands of nutrition and taste. At our kids school it follows the usual form with a hot meal, a sallad buffe, several kinds of crisp bread (one organic), organic milk and water. For every child under the age of 12 a free breakfast is served if they arrive an hour before the lessons start. No sodas, sweets or such are allowed in school until the 7th year of school.

Vacation, vacation, vacation.

Me and my partner Noa are having a nice and slow vacation at home right now. This summer is the first one in many, many years we have tried this. We usually only take vacations when we need to travel to some relatives or have other very specific plans. Now we have two week of just hanging out at home.

Today I am this home a bit more nice to hang out in. I am remodeling two rooms. The first the kitchen aka our son’s bedroom*. The old wallpapers were a strange pinkish red with unknown japanese signs on them. They were of very, very poor quality and generations of stains covered them and from the very beginning we all hated them. But not until now, 18 months after we moved in here I have finally taken them on me and as I write a purpleish brown is drying in there.

* This is a 3 bedroom apartment and we have a need of four bedrooms. The part of the kitchen were a table is supposed to be is a bit to small for our family and the many dinner guests we often have so we are right now using the dining part of the kitchen as a bedroom for the four year old son.

The other room is one of our two bathrooms. It is a tiny 13 ft² so it is done with almost no effort and very much needed.

As soon as I am ready I hope to succeed in dragging my family out to the woods and work on our bilberry/european blueberry stash in the freezer. It is perfect weather to work outside. Sunny and beautiful but only 55-60°F.

Well, I have to go back to my rollers before the day is over.

Hej all my lovies

I do love you and I do miss you all! Thanks for all the written messages and all the thoughs you have given me the last months.

I know I am a bad blogger but hey; this is my blog and I won’t feel bad for not following the expectations ohter people set up for this.

I am having the time of my life! I love, love, love my job. My boss is the most decent guy you could meet, we share an office with four witty, funny guys that we get to have fika with two times every day. The summer is all that it is cranked up to be and my friends are really good friends.

This summer is in much colored by the fact that we don’t have any money right now but having a great job and great friends make that a small secondary thing.

Besides the monitary issue there is another cloud on my sky and that is my health. I am so happy being the right person at the right place now but my body seems to need more time to relax and re-charge so it told me to keep the paste down now.

In a week we are gong to have two weeks of vacation and we had some grand plans but we just had to admit that I need to take it easy so now we have nothing booked for that time and I will try to sleep as much as possible and really take care of this body that I worked so hard to get.

Today I decluttered our bedroom. It was something that I probably needed to do many, many weeks ago but besides that I am very happy I got it done today. I have a minor allergy to some kinds of dust and haven’t been able to breath freely for a while so I hope my body will reward me with a good night sleep now.

It is finally turning almost dark in the evenings now. After two months of light it is now so dark in the late evenings that is a point of turning some lamps on. I do love the summer light up here but I do long for a night when it gets really dark so the stars will shine. I think it is about a month left until that.

Bye for now. I hope I wont be as long until next time we see each other.

New office, new season, new blogpost

Hi there, remember me? I used to blog here a while ago.

Spring has arrived in it’s questionable glory. When my sisters in the mid and southern parts of Sweden tells me about all the flowers, the warm weather and the first dip of the year. Unfortunately our spring is a bit more modest and today it included both pea size hail and snow. But there is a lot of green and I think the last snow piles gave up and died a few days ago.

Today we moved from a home office to a very real and very nice office down in the city. Me and (ex) hubby work together but now we get to share an office with another company and get to meet actual other grownups every day! And besides from being adult they also seems really nice and fun people to be around.

This is also releasing a lot of space at home. Two officespaces, my was taking up half of our bedroom and my partner had his own room that only was functioning as an office. I will probably declutter my space and make it more easy to start painting. I haven’t met any creativity in a really long while. But maybe if I made it more accable.

I am sorry I have been so invisible both here and in other places. It is really fun to have an inspiring job with tons of work to do but a full time job, three small kids and a couple of organisations that needs time takes up all of my time right now.