“Dad, can we play that things-that-didn’t-exist-when-you-were-a-kid game again?”
– Son, from the backseat, yesterday

Oh, where to begin. Of course we didn’t have cell phones, flat screen TVs - color TVs, actually - remote controls, shoes with Velcro instead of laces, and in the words of a 4331-member strong Facebook group, “When I was your age, hockey bags didn't have [bleeping] wheels on them”.

There were no Crocs, no CDs, no DVDs, no Euros, no toy Kalashnikovs, and no Star Wars Lego merchandise. We did have clogs, and VHS, and my father used to make wooden pistols, and leather holsters for me.

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A friend of mine was in Paris for the first time last week, and fell completely in love with the City of Light. Understandable, as it is one cool city, with the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Seine, and the rest of it.

Like London, Paris is way too cool and way too close for us to not go there every year. It’s right there, a two-hour flight, and well, even if my French isn’t what it used to be - those two years of French I slept through, literally, at college, have been reduced to a funny anecdote - I hear the French speak English these days.

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The characters in Enid Blyton’s The Five Find-Outers and Dog series (and Blyton’s Famous Five and the Secret Seven series and all the other detective books, like the Three Investigators, or the Girl Detective, all very popular at the Oulunkylä Public School library) always found things. They found something that got them started on a case, and they found stuff during the case.

To find something on the street has always fascinated me. Finding something requires more than just luck. Not a lot more, but a little. You have to be alert enough to see that something, and not too lazy to leave it lying there.

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Gentlemen,

Welcome back to our humble home. It’s not always this humble, but ever since the tiny water damage in the upstairs bathroom, we’ve had to make some adjustments.

Make yourself at home, while you’re renovating ours. He he. A little joke there. What’s a little lighthearted banter among friends, right? I really feel like I’ve gotten to know you during the four months it’s taken you to put back the tiles in our eight-square-meter bathroom.

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The Fantastic Four, also known as Family, walked slowly through the shopping mall, towards the bus stop. Wife carried the backpack with all the food we had just bought, I had a loaf of bread in my hand – a miscalculation, yes –, Son was 50 meters ahead of Wife and me, Daughter was examining something 50 meters behind us.

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Hey man,

Anybody ever tell you that you look like a lot of people? Not sure what it is, maybe the fact that you’re kind of chubby, but not, in the Colin Firth kind of way, and your hair’s long, but short, and curly but straight, and when you hide behind a magazine like that, you really have just yourself to blame if somebody mistakes you for another person.

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"I have a little game I play in my head. Often when I’ve pitched a project or sent a job application, or something similar, I got to the gym to work all the anxieties out of my body. I send my thoughts, all my stuff into the ether, then pull back and let the universe work its magic on me."

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“The affable Helge Berglund claims there are more than a hundred thousand active players and about seven thousand hockey teams in Sweden. How fitting, he reflects, that the Johanneshov isstadion should be the scene of the world championship competition. “The stadium’s fame as the Mecca of ice hockey,” he continues in his own bouncy style, “is once more sustained.”
– Mordecai Richler on the 1963 hockey world championships in Dispatches from the Sporting Life

Call me crazy, call me weird - just call me - but whenever I travel to a new city, I like to go see the hockey arena there. I used to also buy a hockey hat from each city, but stopped doing that after my trip to Rouen, France when I walked a good five kilometers in rain mixed with snow to find the one store that carried hockey hats. So, these days, I buy the hats only if the store that I happen to go into - and I always go to one - has them.

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Remember a while ago when I wrote that "remember a while ago when I wrote that “[t]here is no place - and this is no exaggaration, simply a fact, so I repeat it: no place - a Swede can’t set up a bench, or hasn’t already done so"?"

Well, the other day I went for a walk with the family and I thought about how in the fall I wrote that "I went for a walk and thought about how I said that, and how right I was. I think I may have even said it out loud, 'that thing you wrote about the benches last summer, on July 14, that was so right on, it was so true.'"

The thing that made me remind myself of that piece that made me remind myself of the other piece was a bench that I saw on my way to the mall.

This one:

I still don't get this.

“It feels so unreal, was it the same for you?”
– Brother-in-law, 48 hours before the arrival of his first-born

Apparently, only four percent of children are born on the actual due date, which, to me, makes the whole concept of having one date simply ludicrous. If that’s the best they can do, why not simply give the parents a good ballpark guestimate, say, a week, and leave it at that.

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“Do you remember the first time you watched a movie on a DVD? What was it?”
– Wife, last night

Sometime in 1978, my father brought home two boxes that did wonderful things. Both were really good at just one, of course, but together, they revolutionized the way our household worked.

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Last night, I held a pretty decent speech to Son, about owning up to things. About how it takes more courage to stand up and confess a mistake than it takes to … do something else. I can’t remember what the other stuff was, but it was something very macho, and tough, like to do a jedi jump.

I went on a good ten minutes about the importance of being a great loser, and then of course, told him how, at the Olympics, all the players had to walk through the mixed zone and talk about the loss they had just been delivered.

And for good measure, I threw in Henrik Lundqvist’s name because I know it carries some major weight around here. So, if Henke Lundqvist can come ut and talk to the press right after he’s faced four shots and made just one save in one period in an Olympic quarterfinal, then Son can surely muster up some courage to tell me who it really was that spilled that glass of orange juice onto the carpet.

Right?

Great losers aren’t born. They’re made.

So I went to a place called "Olympics" and the next thing I know, three weeks just flashed by. I hope you had your "risto+pakarinen" Google alerts on, and caught at least some of my stuff on IIHF.com during the games and the Games.

Like this blog entry, about an event of which I wrote here earlier.

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