With all the snow that we have in Stockholm now, the kids will never believe me if I tell them that when I was a kid I had to walk barefoot through more snow than they’ve ever seen. But, fortunately, I have other stories to make my own childhood seems fairly Dickensian.

Like the fact that I didn’t have a real bed when I was five years old and, instead, slept on a piece of cardboard between two chairs that faced each other.

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The other day, a friend of mine laughed when he told me about a hockey player who wore number 99. He thought it was sacrilege. Since nobody can be Gretzky, nobody anywhere should wear that number, he said.

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To say that I am a handyman is a major overstatement. In fact, if somebody comes up to you and tells you that, call him a liar. That’s what it is, an outright lie. I can’t fix anything, I can’t build anything, unless I can do it with tape. (But I did once write a series of columns under the pseudonym "Handy Cap").

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The plan was to get up early and see Helsinki from afar, from the sea. See the two churches somewhere in the horizon, the President’s castle, the City Hall, and the market square, and the Ferris wheel of the amusement park. I wanted to go out to Deck 12 as the ferry was approaching the tiny bay, and I wanted to feel the cold air on my face, and I wanted to worry about how the wind was going to mess up my hair.

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I’m in the kitchen. I’m making a hot dog, I have bought the buns and the sausages just an hour ago. They’re the Swedish style, in which the bun is only about a third of the length of the dog so when you eat it, you invariably have to start by biting off the ends that hang outside the bun on both sides. And then I hear the horns of the song, and my feet begin to tap. Then comes Dean Martin’s rich voice, and my feet start to sweep the floor in front of the sink.

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“If you find a job you really love, you'll never work again.”
– Winston Churchill

I’m listening to “The Upside of Irrationality”, by Dan Ariely, because I like to hear how stupid we people are. I like books that take down things that we’ve been taking for granted, like for example, that the bigger the bonus, the better the performance. (According to Ariely, a moderate bonus works best, and a huge bonus actually makes people choke, or lose focus).

He also writes about the importance of meaning in work, and cites several of his experiments as proof of how not only money, but the meaning of the work we do, matters. “Even a small amount of meaning can take us a long way,” he says.

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Guys,

I could barely get out of the bed this morning. That loss last night, that hurt.

So did my back, my groin, and my arms this morning. It’s never easy to get up after one of those late night games, but this time, after I rolled out of the bed, it took me fifteen minutes to get up from the floor. That’s what a loss after 50 intense minutes of shinny does to you. Or me.

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As I write this, I also have three chat windows open on my screen. One, opened this morning, five hours ago, is a MSN window to Wife, who’s sitting at her office. Another one is a Skype window to a buddy in Vienna, Austria, and a Canadian friend just popped up in a Facebook chat window. With the exception of Wife, a chat window is often my preferred method of communication.

It’s nothing personal - naturally, since I am, indeed, chatting with some of my friends throughout the entire day - it’s just that this way we cover a lot of topics and yet, each one of us is free to do other things as well.

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I was walking home from the gym - after a nice hour of sauna if you're curious - listening to music - Bruce Springsteen, and The Promise, if you really want to know - and had just walked through the underpass when I saw something that made me stop: two sets of footprints in the snow.

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On the ground floor of our apartment building, about a floor and a half below us, there was a barbershop. The barber of the barbershop was something of a celebrity, a popular local hero, a sports fan, a fisherman, and an artist.

But first and foremost he was a barber, and because he was Dad’s childhood buddy, and because he had his shop in our building, that’s where I went to get my hair cut. Or, that’s where I went when Mom told me to get a haircut.

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It’s probably the natural grind of a hockey season, and life, that’s made me feel tired of everything. In the line of business that I’ve been in for the last six, seven years, it’s easy to get cynical. The hype around the games, the stars, the general managers, is draining, and in the end, disappointing, because it seems to me that it creates a world that overpromises and underdelivers.

And that’s where cynicism breeds.

I can't remember the last time I smiled while watching hockey.

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