Yesterday, on my way to the gym, I thought I saw a 50-krona bill in the snow on the pavement. I stopped to check - of course - and realized that it was, indeed, a mustard yellow bill with the singer Jenny Lind on it. I quickly picked it up, and then, before slipping it inside my red mitten, I looked to my left and to my right, to see if somebody was watching me.

I’d like to say I did so to find the poor old lady who had dropped it so I could return it, but that was my second thought. That did come before “I can’t believe my luck!” My first thought, though, was: Who’s pulling my leg?

Now, I’m a joker. I sometimes tell a joke, although I can’t seem to remember very many of them at the same time so I mostly do puns, wordplay, and sarcasm. In fact, I monitor my development in Swedish by seeing Wife’s reactions to my puns. Ten years ago, she used to say she’d heard my puns before. In third grade. These days, I seem to be making 7th grade puns.

My Dad, on the other hand, is a prankster. He’s the kind of guy who hides eggs in other people’s pockets, or sticks pepper inside a chocolate bar.

» Continued

Last week, just as I was about to make a long-distance Skype to America, my laptop quietly died. Well, before it died, it froze, and went into a coma. I don’t know if it could hear me, but it didn’t react to anything I did. Not mouse movements, not my tapping on the keys, not even Escape.

I had to switch it off and have it examined.

Two days later I got a call. The man had some good news and some bad news. The bad news was that the hard drive had, indeed, died. The good news was that they were able to retrieve the data.

“I’ll put a folder called ‘backup’ on your new disk then,” said the man with the message.

» Continued

When I first moved to Sweden, I was more than shy to speak Swedish. For a non-Finn that may have seemed a little strange, since I had seven years of Swedish studies - with good grades - under my belt, and I had translated hockey magazines from Norwegian and Swedish into Finnish. And yes, I could read the papers, watch the late night news on TV, and every now and then, I would even send an email in Swedish to my colleagues.

But every Finn knows how difficult it is for us to speak Swedish. Partly because the Finnish accent always gives us away - and Finns would like nothing better than to blend in - and partly because while that fantastic educational system did teach us Swedish grammar, it didn’t teach us how to speak.

» Continued

Even before my father had uttered a word, I knew what he was going to say next. I had heard it before, and always in a voice about two octaves lower than his own because that’s the tone he had heard it in the first time, some 30 years ago.

We were at a hockey game, when I mentioned to him that I'd be going to Turku to interview Juuso Wahlsten. As soon as "Wahlsten" had left my lips, I saw the twinkle in Dad's eyes, the lightbulb over his head, just like I had seen many times before over the years.

“It’s not every day you see a junior team play such good hockey,” Dad said.

» Continued

I’ve never understood why John Lennon would sing “another year over and a new one just begun” in a Christmas song. There’s still a week between Xmas and New Year’s and anything can happen.

For example, six years ago, Wife didn’t have any idea on Xmas Eve that a week later I’d propose to her.

Twelve years ago, we wished each other merry Xmas and a happy new year a couple of days before Xmas Eve because I spent that one in Finland, and wasn’t sure if I’d be back for her New Year’s party.

But I decided to come back because I wanted to be with her. That much I knew then, and that much I know now. Everything else has just happened.

» Continued

I love Santa Claus. And I’m not just saying that to get great presents, really. (Although, hope you remember that, Santa, if it helps). I love the tradition, and now that I’m the one who’s spending his Christmas Eve thinking about Santa Claus plans, making phone calls to friends to see if anyone would be ready to don the red suit and get inside the character, I actually like it even more.

My Santa is not the one that gets in through the chimney in the night. My Santa is the one who walks in to see if there are any nice children in the house, and then leaves his big sack of presents to us.

Although, it’s not that straightforward. It’s almost never been that straightforward.

» Continued

Every year, Son, Daughter, and I take the ferry over to Finland about a month before Xmas. We go see the grandparents, and other family, and spread a little advance Xmas cheer. Each year, we drive up to Dad’s, and we go to hockey games.

A few weeks ago, we made our 4th Annual Road Trip to Finland, and we saw two games, one of them a road trip inside our Road Trip, as we drove 150 kilometers to catch a Finnish league game in Kuopio. And not only that, but we watched it from a luxury suite.

That means one thing: Real food.

» Continued

“Is the number 17 in there? See if number 17 is there,” I heard from around the room.

I lifted one of the sweaters in the white box, just to see what was available. There are many codes in hockey, most of which I wouldn’t be able to repeat, but one of them is not to make a big deal out of your own number. On any team, everybody always knows each other’s numbers so it’s not a problem, but when you’re playing shinny … it’s a different story.

I lifted one sweater - a number 3 - and put it back down. I picked up another one. It was 21. I put it back in the box.

» Continued

Listen, man. I don't know how many of you people believe in astrology … yeah, yeah, that's right, baby. I am a Sagittarius, the most philosophical of all the signs. But anyway, I don't believe in it. I think it's a bunch of bullshit myself. But I tell you this, man. I tell you this: I don't know what's gonna happen, man, but I wanna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames. All right! ALL RIGHT!
– Jim Morrison

About 15 years ago, I went through a big Jim Morrison phase in my life. I don’t remember exactly what triggered it, but it most likely was the Oliver Stone movie which came out in 1991. I probably watched it on video in my apartment, and decided that I was Jim Morrison.

Although, I always knew I wasn’t Jim Morrison. I wasn’t crazy like Jimbo, I wasn’t dangerous like Mr Mojo Risin’. Yet, I also knew that even if I wasn’t the Lizard King, I, too, could do anything.

» Continued

It’s not unusual to lose things in a move. Moving every little thing you have, your entire life, from one place to another is a big undertaking in itself, and to make it a little more challenging, you often do it very quickly, in a matter of hours.

I’ve moved twelve times in my life, and ten times since (and including the time) I moved from home, to go to college. That time, I had no furniture to take with me, all I had was clothes and records. A few plates, and glasses and forks and knives.

And my VW Beetle.

» Continued

The players on my table hockey game were made of steel. I think one of the teams was Team Finland, but I’m not sure anymore. I am sure, though, that even a 7-year-old kid could grab those flat tin players by the head and bend them into an S shape, if they, for example, wouldn’t shoot the puck right, or if the goalie let in a soft goal.

It was also easy to curve the blades on their sticks so they were exactly like the real players’ sticks.

The little metal guys did their best, and so did I. My Dad, however, probably didn’t bring his best game to the table, but even his second-best was a little too good for me.

» Continued

FADE IN.

EXT. A small yellow car is driving on a long city street. On one side of the street, there is a river, on the other, some small houses.

INT. Zooming in, we see two young men inside the car.

» Continued

On my first day of work in Sweden, 13 years, 6 months, and 22 days ago, I took the subway from my apartment, a place that a friend of a new colleague let me use for a couple of weeks while I was looking for a place of my own, and I headed downtown.

I had only lived in Stockholm for five days, and had mostly just walked around the neighbourhood – and accumulated parking tickets right outside my apartment building.

I got on the red subway line towards downtown, and sat down reading a book, like a real Stockholmer. And then, as the subway train got closer to the Old Town where the office was, I … well, I panicked. I got off at a stop that was just before the Old Town, foolishly thinking that it would be faster to walk from there than to walk from the actual Old Town stop.

» Continued

In April 1917, when the Russian Bolshevik leader Lenin traveled through Stockholm, the Swedish Communists Ture Nerman and Fredrik Ström took their comrade to PUB where they bought him a new suit so he would look good coming back to Russia.
– Wikipedia

Hundreds of thousands of Finns travel to Stockholm each year, most of them on one of the two ferry lines that have their ships go back and forth the two capitals - Helsinki and Stockholm - and one former capital - Turku, Finland.

» Continued

In my first year of college, I spent most of the weekends at my Grandma’s little place a half hour north of Helsinki. Well, I actually drove up and spent most of the weekends with my cousins, my uncle’s kids, who shared their yard with Grandma and Grandpa.

They were - are - just a couple of years younger, so e had a lot of fun doing stuff that Grandma and Grandpa probably wouldn’t have wanted to do. I say “probably” because we never asked them if they wanted to come out and go ice skating on the gravel road in the winter, or watch MTV or old TV shows on VHS, or drive up to the sports field and kick a soccer ball with us.

And when it was time to go to bed, we didn’t ask them if they, too, wanted to lie in the dark, listen to music, and crack silly jokes – but then again, by then, they had been asleep for five, six hours.

» Continued

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I happened to be in the audience when three Finnish NHL players held a press conference about their game later that week in Helsinki, Finland. The Anaheim Ducks players were on the podium, in their impressive looking suits that they’re required to wear as stipulated in the Exhibit 14, Paragraph 5 of the collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players’ association.

While listening to them, I happened to notice that two of them were wearing very impressive looking watches on their arms.

» Continued

I can see the McDonald’s golden arches on a rooftop on the other side of the bay from my hotel room. I can also see the big white cathedral, the national museum, and the Hesperia park and the trees around it turning red and yellow. Down below, green trams are going up and down Mannerheimintie, the five and a half kilometers long main street that begins from Erottaja, the most expensive lot in the Finnish version of Monopoly, and turns into highway 3 in the north end.

The McDonald’s sign may have been there 17 years ago, I’m not sure, but I don’t think it was. Neither was the Helsinki Music Centre, or the glass cube which is home to Sanoma, a major Finnish media house.

Mostly, the view over Helsinki looks exactly like it did in 1994 when the NHL took brought Teemu Selänne’s Winnipeg Jets came to town to show how things were done in North America.

» Continued

Sometimes, late at night, when the neighbourhood is quiet, and even the teenagers with the mopeds have gone to bed, I wake up. It’s the silence that wakes me up, but when I sit up, and listen, I can hear a long, whining sound in the distance.

And I laugh.

» Continued

One summer, twenty years ago, I decided that I wanted to play soccer again. I hadn’t done it in years, but I got some guys together, mostly my hockey teammates, and I signed us up for a season in a recreational league.

Our red shirts with “Ericsson Hotline” on the chest were a donation from my Dad’s store, the numbers on the back I had ironed on myself. After all, that’s what coach-GMs do.

In one August evening match, we had a new guy on the pitch, a lanky, blond guy who had a fantastic stride as he flew down the left lane. He was one of my late recruits, a necessary addition, due to some injuries and general summer recreational soccer league no-shows.

» Continued

Many years ago, in a world without the Internet, when people in Finland didn’t want to line up to the bank to go pay their bills, they could send them to the bank to be automatically - in a world when IT was still automatic data processing - withdrawn from their account on the due date.

All banks had their own systems, but the one in which I worked one summer, had something they (we) called the Green Envelope. It couldn’t have been easier: all you had to do - besides have money - was to stuff the green envelope with your bills, and send it to the bank. And the best part was that those special green envelopes didn’t even need postage stamps.

» Continued

When Wife and I met over a decade ago – time flies when you’re having fun raising a family – the beginning of our relationship was all a big secret. After all, it was an office romance, and we didn’t want people talking about us, so we kept it all under wraps and during office hours, we acted normal. Nobody suspected anything.

Or so we thought.

» Continued

I spend most of most days sitting at home, in my home office, in front of my laptop. I sit here, under a photo of Bobby Orr’s “The Goal”, and I type away. I chat, and I make those funny comments on Facebook, I tweet, I email, and I write stories.

I still tell people how great it is to work late at night when the family has gone to bed, “because there are no interruptions, the phone won’t ring”, but I don’t know why I say that. The phone never rings.

» Continued

I have about 400 friends on Facebook. One of them is my mother. Right now, her status is, “another CrossFit torture awaits tomorrow.”

If you don’t know what CrossFit is, I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. I don’t know what it is, either. I mean, I can guess that it’s some kind of a workout method, and based on what Mom told me, it’s really good. Weights, and balance, and stretching, and more balance. Agility, too. All great things for anyone, but as Mom told me, “important stuff as you get older.”

It’s no surprise that I didn’t know what CrossFit was, or is. I’m the guy who still has the exact same workout regime he had 15 years ago. It’s actually true. When I do go to the gym, Friday is still my leg day, and I do the same exercises I’ve always done.

» Continued

The CEO stood in front of the entire staff, all of them dressed in casual summer clothes, and recapped the assignment that was about to cap off the official part of the conference. One more push and then they all would get back on a boat, get back to the mainland, and go have dinner at a nice restaurant.

But first, the assignment, the creative challenge that would also - hopefully - generate some solid ideas that the CEO could then use in sales. With about 40 great minds gathered in one place, she went for the kill.

“So, your assignment is to create a magazine concept for Marimekko,” she announced.

» Continued

If you’re not already on Twitter, and are thinking about joining, don’t. If you, poor bastard, are on Twitter, why aren’t you following me?

Oh yes, I’m there, one of millions and millions of people thinking that there are people out there who’d like to hear what I have to say. All those funny observations that usually only Wife gets to hear - as well as links to my stories that I usually make Wife read - I can now broadcast to the world! To the world, I say!

» Continued

“Can’t you tell me those funny George Lucas’s Beard jokes again, Dad?” said Son.

“Sure I can,” I said.

Sometimes I don’t even realize how funny I am. Some of those times I’m funny because I make a “cute” mistake in Swedish, and Wife just can’t get enough of it. Or, I’m so scared on a roller coaster that I hold on to the car with my knuckles white as snow, my arms all spread out, so that I practically push Wife over board, and when she then sees me on the post-ride photo, she tells me that I’m “doing that funny thing with my face again.”

» Continued

“Oh, Sir, just one more thing.”
– Lt. Columbo, LAPD

Whenever I’m alone at home, with Wife and Son and Daughter away somewhere, I watch an episode of Columbo, the show about Lt Columbo, a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department.

Because I own every single Columbo DVD box there is, I have a pretty good collection to choose from, and it’s just a matter of mood whether I want to go for one of the early 1970s cases, in which Peter Falk looks like he could still run after a bad guy if he wanted to, and in which his old Peugeot still looks mostly European, instead of just old, or a 1980s style Columbo.

» Continued

Every time people tell me that “it’s a small world..” when I know somebody they also know, my shtick is to finish their sentence with “… and Finland’s even smaller.” (When the person in question is Finnish, of course, I realize it doesn’t really work otherwise).

I see evidence of the smallness of Finland if not every day, then every week, or at least every month, on Facebook, when a friend of mine friends another friend of mine, and I didn’t know they were friends, too.

And then I go and “like” their friendship, a cyberversion of me putting my arms around them both and saying, “now, isn’t this fantastic?”

» Continued

The huge metal door to the main arena was closed, so I couldn’t see which team, if any, was on the ice. I had come to the arena to see if Russia’s goalie was on the ice, or whether he had really got injured the night before.

I was about to open the smaller door, the one that’s meant for people, not Zambonis, but just as I put my hand on the handle, it went down on its own. I pulled and the door flew open, but not all the way because the person on the other side was holding it. The first thing I saw was a dark blue jacket. As I looked up from the Czech logo on the jacket, I saw the man’s face. I recognized him.

His name is Jaromir Jagr.

» Continued

So, I’m sitting at the Coffee & Co at the Laurinska street in the Bratislava Old Town. The sun is shining, the coffee is good, and the mind peaceful, so I just leaned back in my chair, and looked at the people walking past me. Many of them are tourists, most even, as always in all the Old Towns in all the world.

One of the people who just passed me was a big man in a beige jacket, blue jeans, blue sweater. He was wearing sunglasses like Jack Nicholson, and he had done some shopping. The big man walked like big men do, in long and heavy steps, as if he had to make an extra effort to beat the gravity with every step. But, as he walked by my table in the sun in just a few seconds, he also had a special jump to his step.

» Continued

Sometimes, when I’m standing around in the kitchen, waiting for the espresso machine to heat up, I see a common magpie land in our front yard. It’ll hop there, glance around, strut around with a swagger, looking all classy in black-and-white, like it’s walking on a red carpet on its way to a gala dinner.

Although, there’s something a little sneaky about it, too. It hops, looks around, as if to see if anybody is watching its every move.

» Continued

I wonder how many people an average person meets in his lifetime. I actually think about that quite often, when I’m on the subway, at the airport, or, like now, sitting at a coffee shop. And when I think about meeting people, I mean connecting, not just being in the same place at the same time.

For example, I haven’t really met that bald man in front me, even if we just had eye contact. (Then we both looked away). Those two women to my right, with their cool glasses and salads and scarfs, aren’t people I’ve met, in these official meetings statistics.

They could be.

» Continued

Even though I can’t order a croissant in Paris, and have practically never spoken Spanish with a Spanish-speaking person, I proudly list both French and Spanish under “language skills” on my resumé.

And why not, I had, after all, somehow passed my French exams in business school - the ones I quite literally slept through, forcing me to learn two year’s worth of French on my own – and even studied two years of Spanish at the same university. I do know the lyrics to "Besame Mucho", and feel pretty good lip syncing to "La Bamba". Yo no soy marinero.

» Continued

I got fired from my first job. I had fought long and hard to get it, finally landing a position that I hadn’t even applied for, getting hired just on being persistent. Having seen the scores of my interviews and psychological tests, the consultants had recommended hiring somebody else.

I knew that when I called the CEO a few nights later, while driving on the highway. We talked about the job, and my tests, and I remember telling him that I disagreed with the results because I knew I’d be great at the job. He agreed.

“I agree, those tests are a bunch of crock,” he said. “I like you.”

» Continued

A few blocks from the hospital where I was born, a few blocks, but the other way from the house where we lived when I was born, two blocks from where we lived when Son was born, and just around the corner from where my parents’ friends, and my sometime babysitters lived, there used to be a movie theater.

For decades now, in its place, there’s been a Pentecostal Church.

» Continued

A year before we moved, Dad had another job offer, and everything about it sounded nice, but we stayed put in Helsinki. I used to like to think that I had vetoed the move, but upon a few decades’ reflection, I’m not sure if I should be so proud of that – if it was true. But I just liked being where I was, playing hockey with the guys I knew, going to the school I had gone to with the same people I had known for the past six, seven years.

» Continued

The times they have a-changed: This morning, I woke up to an invitation to come dance at the nearby disco. There was a time when waking up to an impromptu disco dancing pajama party would have been nothing short of cool. That would have been the kind of story I would have told my friends over and over again, as proof on my own coolness.

The impromptu disco dancing event I woke up to this morning wasn’t that, but there I was, dancing in my pajamas, like the rest of the family. Son woke us up to join him in his room, in his disco, where he was the DJ, playing music from the Harry Potter movies. Daughter did cartwheels, and Wife and I careful dance moves: she was cool, I was the dork that I am on the dance floor.

» Continued

I probably could have jammed myself into the subway train, had I really been obnoxious and pushy. Literally pushy. But I’m so lazy that instead of doing that, and having to stand up all the way from the arena to the train station, I decided to take the next train. I understand that I still had to stand there, outside, for another three minutes waiting for the next train, but then I’d get to sit down, I figured.

The train arrived, and sure enough, it was almost empty. I got a window seat, and continued reading my book – Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro – as the doors closed.

» Continued

When I was three, and we were visiting family friends, I would make a point of asking the host/ess where my coffee cup was. Because, apparently, I drank coffee back then. One part coffee, 52 parts milk, I suppose. At 4, I quit drinking coffee, to the point where I wouldn’t even eat coffee-flavored ice cream.

Or couldn’t because I couldn’t handle the taste.

» Continued

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.

» Continued

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").

» Continued

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.

» Continued

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.

» Continued

Counting down Top 9 of 2010 .. next stop: Number 2!



April 26, 2010 » Naming rights
On our hockey team’s trip to Sweden in the late 1970s, one of the players fell in love with Hubba Bubba chewing gum, because he could make huge bubbles with it. Of course, one of them exploded in his face, covering it completely, and leaving him picking gum off his face for days.

We, the rest of the team, decided to call him Hubba Bubba.

Ironically, that didn’t stick.

Click here for full story.

Counting down to December 24, here''s the Top 9 list of the year.

At number 3...


March 7, 2010 » Born To Be My Baby
There we were, reading the paper, eating toast, drinking tea, talking about stuff we saw in our newspapers. So, Brother-in-law, even at this point, seeing Girlfriend - your sister - giving birth to a child, and myself becoming a father, seemed very surreal. We were just having breakfast.

Click here for the full story.

We're almost there. It's so exciting!

Nummmbbeeeerr fooooooour:


August 26, 10 » Discovery channel
All my life I’ve been waiting to get discovered. It may be because I’m lazy by nature, although I think that since I’d simply like to be discovered for what I’ve done - instead of just playing the lottery - I think I’m not a complete slacker.

Click here for full story

Without further ado - really: Number 5.

July 20, 2010 » No Sweat
Of course, the line between the good sweat and the bad one can be a bit blurry at times. For example, a good workout sweat on a T-shirt that’s forgotten in a bag for three days and then pulled out may force other people at the gym to cover their noses with their shirts.

(Or, at least I’ve seen one guy do it once, doing a shoulder workout next to me, while I was doing bench press).



Click here for full story.

Less than a week to go! Counting down the Top 9 of 2010, we've reached number 7.


January 10, 2010 » Sink or swim
"I’m in the water. I’m telling myself to stay calm. Breathe. I inhale and move my arms and legs fast. I seem to be floating. Maybe I can do this after all. "

Click here for full story.

The countdown continues. A brand new archived story - how's that - every day between, well, yesterday and Christmas Eve. Every day!

Number eight
April 8, 2010 » Mormor
Back then, Wife had a roommate, and I remember her telling me wonderful stories about how the two of them would cook dinner together, and then eat in front of the TV, watching their favorite show.


Click here for full story.

“Remember what the sign on Walt Disney’s desk said: ‘Always be yourself’”
– Dad, all my life

When people hear that I write a lot about hockey, their first question is usually, “oh, what’s your favorite team?” And when they realize I’m a Finn, living in Sweden, writing about hockey, the question gets modified to, “who do you root for when Sweden plays Finland in the World Championships?”

» Continued