One more day to guess the bridges!

So far only the bridge on the 1st of advent and on Christmas day has three correct guesses, so there are many more points to gather. Don’t forget that you can get points even if there is a correct answer already. So far there are still 11 bridges where not one correct answer has been given. (There might be answers there but they aren’t correct, and no I won’t tell you which bridges).

There are clues on all bridges now, hope you get some help from them.

Hard bridges?

I guess it wasn’t easy to figure out what bridge it was in the pictures of the advent calendar. I will now give a clue about three days after I posted the picture so you might get it as long as it hasn’t gotten three (3) right answers here as a comment to the post. So you might want to check back a few days and continue guessing. So far there aren’t three right answers on any of the bridges I’ve posted.

The last bridge with clue is this one: 3d December Bridge Tomorrow there will come a new clue…

Good luck!

2014 – A year to remember?

2013 was an amazing year. As it started I didn’t know what it would hold for us. I had a few expectations, but they are dwarfed by what actually happened.

(See my post from the 10th of January last year: http://blog.wolfmaier.se/wolfie217/2013/01/10/new-year-what-will-you-bring/)

Here are the points that I thought of as certain last year:

  • I will go back to work. (Just the date is not decided yet).
  • Our daughter will turn two. (She actually turns 16 months today).
  • We will travel to Skåne a few times, the first trip to see my cousin in law become a priest in the Church of Sweden.
  • Our daughter will learn so many more things.

Little did I know then that some of the things on the list would be bigger, more altering than I thought.

We had already been thinking of making the move when I wrote this, but nothing was planned. So now to what actually happened:

  • I did go back to work, just not the work I used to go to. I’m doing so many new things. I’m having great new colleagues. It’s in a new town.
  • Our daughter turned two and is easier and easier to understand. She even talks in two languages some times.
  • We travelled to Skåne many times. Now we travel to Stockholm. First we travelled to look for houses, then to get the key to our apartment. After that the direction changed and we travel to Stockholm to visit family and friends.
  • Our daughter is still learning so many things.

But the biggest things that happen were not thought of:

We made the move, leaving our home in Stockholm for a new one in Skåne, first in Höör, then in our house in Gamla Bo.

  • I got a new job. A great job at Ramböll in Malmö.
  • We bought a house on the country side.
  • We are expecting a little Poff to join us in 2014. Poff being the working name of our next kid.

This leads me up to the headline question: 2014 – A year to remember?

It definitely will be. We will have our second kid; that is really big. We have been looking forward to have at least one more kid, but as things dragged along it wasn’t easy for me at least. I wanted the kids to be closer in age. One just has no say in how fast things go. Now there won’t be too long between them, just a little less than three years and that is fine, it was just longer than I hoped for.

I don’t know how our daughter will react to Poff arriving but I think she will become a great big sister. She already talks about the little little baby living in mom.

I do know that Poff will be born into a nice home.

By the way, Poff comes from the fact that at some point a friend of ours called Susanna and me Piff and Puff, as the chipmunks in Donald duck. Our daughter had the working name of Paff before she was borne.

Now we just have to get the home in order. We have had my parents here for Christmas and New Year and they have helped us a great deal, making our home liveable. There are still plenty of things to be done until some real ordinary life will show up, many boxes to be unpacked, lamps fixed (they have to stay at the apartment until it is clean; we keep it until the last of January). Curtains and pictures on the walls might take a longer time.

Owning a house is much more an ongoing project than renting a place. The list of what is to do will grow faster than we can check things off.

Back to the question, now a few points to remember from 2014 that we already know:

  • A trip to Zambia.
  • Poff being born.
  • The first summer in our house.

There will probably be a few more things. It won’t be an ordinary year. It will just not be the life changer that 2013 has been.

(And we do have a guest room).

New job, new place, time for an update maybe?

The last couple of weeks have been eventful. As I wrote earlier we have decided to move to Skåne. We want to live in a house. Finding a house 600 km away isn’t easy. So we will move anyway. To a rental apartment first so that we can look for a house while we already live in the area and we don’t have time pressure.

First things first:

I have a new job; I will be starting in September working at Ramböll, a consulting firm with an office in Malmö, with similar things that I was working with before I left for parental leave. There will be some new tasks, I’m looking forward to learning new things and this is broadening my possibilities. I think this might be my dream job; it is at least at the company where I have been dreaming of working.

I had to quit my current job because of that, they did know that I was moving though so it didn’t really come as a surprise that I might want to try something new.

More new jobs:

Susanna will work in Malmö too. She will start there and when I start working she will be staying home with our daughter. This got final this last week too.

What about a house?

During our trip after Easter we looked at 13 houses. Here is a description of that; it was posted before we looked at the last house though. The last house was a bit of a tricky one, good location and plot of land, but an unplanned house with far too many stairs. And there were some parts of the house that weren’t ready.

A few weeks ago we went down there again, this time with my parents. We wanted to look at a house again. Good we took them along, to live in that house we will have to invest some money as it had some major flaws that we as laymen didn’t see.

We did look at two other houses too:

The chicken farm:

First we looked at an old chicken farm. The house was nice and all, but the old chicken barns would have given us a bit much to do, keeping the place in good order. The barns hadn’t been used for chickens for a while; they were rented out as storage for old cars during the winter months, we could have kept that concept, but then we would have to keep the roofs in perfect condition.

The house with the humongous living room:

The house with the humongous living room was right by the railway-line between Malmö and Stockholm. The house was a converted summer house, extended in several steps to its size. The plot of land was nice too, a bit forest, close to a lake and close to a future (maybe in one year from now) railway station. A few things would have to be done with the place for us to move in though.

We can imagine ourselves living there, but we didn’t want to make a fast deal because we want to do it right, and we want the place to be the right place. But as we had our jobs organised we need some place to stay.

Some place to rent:

So we have started to look for a place to rent for the time until we have found the house we want to live in. We haven’t signed anything yet but there is an apartment that we were offered and we will (if nothing happens till Monday) let them know we want it. That would give us a place to live from the first of July. (Hint hint: If you want to help us move, it will probably be by mid-July).

We have also cancelled this place, we didn’t want to pay double rent for more than two months, so now we really hope everything works out otherwise we’ll be homeless by the end of August (actually by the end of July as we need the home to be less far from Malmö by then).

So this was a short update on what is going on here. Life is exciting.

New blog platform

Welcome!
I have decided to move my blog to Blogger. Myspace, where I had the blog before changed the layout, not to my liking, so now I’ll blog here.
I will reposted some of the latest blog post here too, but to find all of them go to: http://www.myspace.com/wolfmaier_217/blog
Most pictures are still posted on my homepage: http://wolfmaier.se
Hope you enjoy my new choice of platform.