Elbow Grease

I've been getting into a daily habit of carrying really heavy things home from work, or wherever I might find myself. My arms are going to be huge if I keep this up.

On Friday Johannes and I took our first trip to IKEA, to find some very basic furnishings for our apartment, like curtain rods, a bath mat, a lamp and light fixtures hooks and a soap dish. Generally I don't feel so good buying from huge corporations like that—and we have done a great job so far in finding used furniture, dishes and such; much of which has come from relatives, and a bit from second hand shops—but the reality of what young people can afford is settling in my mind. In Sweden, so I have heard, a mutual trip to IKEA is the ultimate test of any relationship. If you can come out of there still loving each other, than you've got nothing to worry about. But if you slam the car doors on your newly bought items in their giant blue tarp-bags, and ride the whole way home, either fuming in silence or yelling and bickering, well, then you might see the divorce papers in the next year. Again, it's just a saying. I'm glad to say we made it out of there no problem! ;) I looked into the other legends and sayings around IKEA and found this absolutely hilarious website, most of which is total crap, but funny nonetheless. What you don't know about IKEA.

While out in the industrial nowheres, we also picked up a vacuum cleaner, a board, A.K.A. a will-be-shelf, some screws and nails, a mop, light bulbs, a saw and all those little things that are just ridiculously important. All of that went home with us on two busses. Oh, and when we got to our station, I managed to haggle some free crates from a fruit man while Johannes ran into the store to grab some milk. I saw the fruit stand guy stomping on perfectly good plastic and wooden crates and tossing them into the trash, so I left all of our purchases by the bench I'd been waiting by, ran over to him and in my very broken, low-vocab Swedish asked if I could have them. He and his colleague gathered up a few crates for me and I told them I'd be back the next day for more. Johannes and I are trying to gather up as many pallets are we can, so we can build a raised-platform dining corner in the kitchen, like comfy, low- table structure, and I need some for the garden. Repurposing things is the way to go. So I walked with three crates piled so high on top of my vacuum cleaner box that I could hardly see where I was going. Johannes kindly swapped with me after 2 minutes of me struggling to keep upright, and I got to carry all the poles and other things. I'm kind of OCD when it comes to crums (HAH that rhymes.) I love going barefoot— kind of hate socks, they give me claustrophobia— and simply cannot stand the feeling of crumbs and things sticking to my feet all the time, if the floor is dirty. I also drop a lot of hairs, and they freak me out, so then brooms become kind of pointless. I really love vacuums and am SO happy to have finally bought my own. I vacuumed the floor the very next morning, and I love it! 

 The following day I insisted on browning my green thumb, and took a trip to Plantagen, a large garden center store. I found lots of seeds, a spade, a very practical two-compartment gardening "bag," a seed starter and a 40 liter bag of organic soil. I had originally piled two 40 liter bags onto my cart, but then reconsidered the health of my back at the checkout and put one of them back. Good thing I brought a giant IKEA bag with me, because I think I wouldn't have managed otherwise, and good thing I only got one bag! I barely made it home under the weight of the soil, and thankfully found some very kind benches to rest on along the trek home after taking 2 busses and a train. I felt like I was carrying around an unconscious child to the hospital or something, clutching that soil-filled IKEA bag to my chest and walking as fast as possible. I made it home alive and then planted 60 seedlings in the starter, set out 4 potatoes and guerilla gardened; I randomly planted potatoes out and about around the apartment's exterior. Now my lower back hurts, not to mention my arms.

Yesterday I began to work again at Rosenhill, and brought home a 3 kilo bucket of local honey form the farm, along with a huge bag of groceries, and a liter of an organic all-purpose cleaner.

This morning I really thought that I'd go to work and return with nothing more than my backpack, but of course another round of groceries ensued because well, when you work hard and carry lots of stuff home, you tend to cultivate a voracious appetite. First stop was at ICA(normal grocery store),  for some basics that fit into my backpack, no biggie... but then Mat Världen happened. That's the supermarket at our station, and since we live in such an immigrant rich neighborhood, I am one of them, they carry a lot of really cool things that I've never seen before; like carrot jam and twenty different enormous bags of Basmati rice, vessels of pickled things that are hard to identify; in fact, they have a whole aisle dedicated to nothing but pickled things. It's almost a bit spooky. Almost none of those foreign products have Swedish labels, let alone English. Randomly most of the Polish foods are printed in German so luckyily I can understand that. It's quite fun to figure out what some of those random vacuum-sealed sticky black balls are (apparently some sort of dried fruit or berry) and funny things floating in liquids that remind you of things you don't want to think about, but I'm also embarrassed to spend too much time investigating packages, because very-clued-up people all around seem to want to carry about their shopping as usual without weirdo-investigators like me blocking up the aisles, and those things probably appear as "normal" to them as spaghetti and bread do to us. "Us." I don't even know what or who I mean by "Us" but I can't think of a better, less encumbering word for "those of us who find those foods foreign." Right, so Mat Världen happened, and what I mean by that is that I remembered we had no rice at home, and all of those giant bags had always looked so appealing, so I picked out a nice 5 kilo bag of GMO-free basmati from Pakistan and then walked by an inspiring fruit stand that offered some golden orbs. I asked the guy standing next to me what they were and how to eat them. He said he didn't really know but that they were good, and that it was best to peel off the skin and eat the soft flesh. All in very broken Swedish, but I managed to understand. I bought a kilo of those (which I later realized were loquats, a fruit I haven't seen or eaten since 2002, when I lived in Sausalito, in a house on that had a loquat tree with a swing in it, but a swing that was too dangerous to use, and a tree that produced awful-tasting loquats) and an interesting Turkish (at least I think it was Turkish) cow's cheese in brine, summing up to 750g, and some flat breads. Well I guess my hopes for a light load home were totally in vain. But no despair, I am extremely pleased with all the yummy foods I found.

Right now the basmati is cooking, and I am using the instructions on the bag, which are perfectly translated into English, except for the very last phrase, which I find extremely endearing, "Cover pan, lower the heat, and simmer for 5-7 minutes until the rice are fluffy and dry," (how very cute to treat grains of rice like fluffy and dry individuals), and the oven-curry is steaming and rubbing its cauliflower-parsnip-turmeric scent all over the apartment, blending so nicely with the after-glow of yesterday's incense. Now for some fluffy and dry rice individuals, a beautiful vegetable oven curry and some fruit and cheese on the side. Om.