Horror story

Geek! Gawk:
Meek talk,
weak walk.
Sneak, stalk.
Shriek! Squawk…

By now they have been eaten

Veckans ord: övergrepp

En kollega famlar efter något:
– Jag vill ha en övergripande beskrivning av systemet, jag behöver få ett övergrepp.

Still hurts a bit

Dumped

By the closed-down railway track, among all the empty beer cans and spray paint cans, lay a doll who’d seen better days. Only now, when I looked closer at the picture, did I realise she had not just been abandoned, but strangled first. What evil lurks in the hearts of men…

Scared

Various things have coincided and one evening Honeybuns and I said to each other: “Maybe we should, after all, move in together.” And then we, within minutes of looking through housing pages, found the perfect flat out in Huddinge. It was not yet built, but we took the bus out to the construction site and it was a perfectly delightful neighbourhood, near the train station, near the still remaining forests in a nice and quiet area, so I was soon on the phone with the estate agent. Yes, when enough people had signed up for the flats, construction would start, so by end of next year we should be able to move in. All right then.

As soon as I put the phone down, doubts hit us. Would we really manage this? Will we be able to live together with all our foibles, diverging requirements, and other baggage? And can we afford it?

I see my flat even as I am elsewhere: My first own home, the one I’ve furnished to fit my needs, my aerie where the morning sun wakes me in the summer and the afternoon sun fills the sitting-room with a warm golden glow, where I come home to silence and peace after a long day, where my bookshelves offer me knowledge and solace. Honeybuns expresses similar emotions for her home. Still, sharing a home, officially being a co-habiting couple, sleeping in each others arms every night, and not lugging stuff from one end of Stockholm to the other every other day beckons.

So yesterday we arrived, slightly out of breath, at the agent’s office to sign the papers. He informed us that with the great interest in the homes, we would likely be able to move in already by summer. He was perhaps a bit taken aback as both our faces fell. A year had seemed ample time to get used to the idea, but already by summer? That is no time at all. We steeled ourselves and signed the papers.

Now there is no return.

Veckans ord: Alaska

Av någon anledning har alternativmedicinarna fastnat för björkaska som undermedicin. Alaska är det däremot ingen som bryr sig om att ta vara på.

Word of the week: temporarely

Infrequent bursts of speed happen temporarely.

Revealing mistake

The shutter time is 1/1250th of a second. In that time the CCD is scanned sequentially, therefore it seems the propeller is bent out of shape.

Double-checking

When it became obvious that my father was going senile, my sister and I went out looking for good dementia homes. We visited one which looked promising (though Father eventually ended up elsewhere) and the head nurse showed us around. As it happened one of the patients came by and sat down by a piano and started playing. The nurse expressed her amazement at how speech and memory might be lost but the ability to perform music still remained. I noted to myself that the old lady actually did not play any specific piece, but rather stuck together disjointed phrases, executing ingrained motor programmes. I did get to see a lot of that over the following years, how for example greetings and thank-yous remained and were automatically executed at the right cues.

Another common “truth” I’ve heard a lot is that old people get worse short-term memory but have no problem remembering things that happened long ago. It struck me: Has anybody checked whether these long-term memories actually correspond to true events, or might they just as well be constructed there and then?

Thank you