Ride of a lifetime

Posted on March 30, 2010 by Risto

“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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Paris… to

Posted on March 29, 2010 by Risto

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.

This is - allegedly - where Jessica's Dad parked their RV back in the day.

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Finders, keepers

Posted on March 26, 2010 by Risto

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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Open Letter to the Renovation Guys

Posted on March 23, 2010 by Risto

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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Hats off

Posted on March 21, 2010 by Risto

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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Open letter to the guy on the subway who looked a lot like my buddy but wasn’t

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Risto

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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An exercise

Posted on March 17, 2010 by Risto

“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.”

It could have been a dark and stormy night.

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Hovet sweet Hovet

Posted on March 12, 2010 by Risto

“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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Deja view

Posted on March 9, 2010 by Risto

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:

Baffled

Posted on March 8, 2010 by Risto

I still don’t get this.