I am back!

After four weeks holiday I sort of had forgot my regular duties and commitments, which lead to me forgettng to blog last Monday. I do apologise for this rather fatal mistake, but here I am, back with more energy than ever!...Except for today. My energy levels are not as high as they should be after a weekends rest, well saying that, my head is working harder than ever. But my body is not, therefore I am working from bed today. Believe it or not. And no, I have not moved my bed into the office, but I am working from home (Trollhättan) today. The reason for my soar feet and exhausted legs might be that me and some friends went to the Swedish amusement park Liseberg yesterday, lots of fun, but still so exhausting! As a child I could run back and forth in that place for hours, not remebering to eat or caring about what the time was. Energy must have got lost on the way. Somewhere from 12-22 years old I have seemed to been a victime of energy loss. Very peculiar.

Well, anyway I am back at work and it feels like I never been away. The Bombadil dog Pixie looked just the same, John is still pulling his same old jokes and the coffee tastes the same. Good to be back.

A lot of things are happening at the moment in the Bombadil HQ, one thing is that I will take over some work from Mariannes and start being her assitant more or less. Obviosly I will still also be a mentor like before and still handeling my own projects and take care of our website. But now also do some more administrive work. Which I am very happy to do, since I like new challenges and learning new things. The wisedome of today therefore is: Challenge yourself and gain experience. Hell yeah!

over&out
/sara

Jantelagen should be put to bed.

Last Thursday I was reading some poems from my newly released book "Where´s the manual?", of course I was terribly terrified and had problems with standing up straight before even walking into the café where the event was held. Once in the hot, thick air, meeting the crowd and greeting some of my friends I was prepared to run back home again. For the record, I didn´t. Instead I was focusing on keeping up some sort of calm apperance and breathing regularly. Somehow this technique worked because I sort of managed to read my 15 minutes worth of text and even dared to look at my audience. And the absolutely best bit, I was happy with my performance.



Pics above: Café Mejeriet, where the event Dinkytown was held.

A very common expression that reflects Swedish mentality is "jantelag" which basically means that you are not to say anything good about yourself. If you happen to be a brilliant football player you would probably describe yourself as "quite good" or "not worse than anyone else in my team". You are not to have a big head and pat yourself on the shoulder for achieving something good; a good song you´ve written, a specially nice lasagne you´ve made or if your last riding lesson went really well. But you are more than welcome to tone down your skills and the sides of you that show off how good you are at certain things.

I don´t know why our society´s mentality has turned into a self denial and repressing way of being. People are held back by a insvisible law who is telling us to not appreciate ourselves. I´m not trying to proclaim that all of us are going to turn into big show offs and regard ourselves to be better than our neighbour, our next etc. But I want to make a stand for the right to be happy with oneself, and the right to gain self confidence through the experience of feeling happy with ones achievement!

So therefore I was brilliant last thursday; for 15 minutes I owned that stage and I did it well. So dear "jantelag", I´m putting you to bed. At least today. So should everyone do from time to time, maybe you´ll discover that it actually made you feel good.

Over&Out
/sara

Yes, i´m awake!!

Monday-blogger Sara Karlsson at your service, reporting (as always) at the very first day of the week!

Today the sun has been with us all day, which is rather unusual for Mondays. If you remeber last weeks sara-blogg you might recall a bittersweet undertone in regards of the weather...Or just a bitter tone to be frank. But today I have no complaints what so ever. One might say that i´m satisfied. Not bad is it?! Another contribution to my exceptionally good mood is our new co-worker Mari, who started today. A very nice woman who just joined us at Bombadil to help us out with the video-blogging, editing pictures and give us a hand with the setting of books. Brilliant!

The first project we started of with was actually my Challenge Poetry book "Where´s the manual" that will be available in swedish this coming spring. I was choosing the order in which the texts should go and Mari did the same thing, but with pictures. And believe it or not but it turned into a book, at last! At the moment it is mostly odd pages with text cutted and pasted with tejp onto scrap-paper, but most important; it has the layout of the actual book! Tomorrow we are gonna be a bit less old-fashioned and actually use Marianne´s Mac to do they actual layout. So excited!

What a Monday. I even got some staples today, Marianne acknowledged my little hint last week, about getting a stapler but no staples to put inside it. So today when I got to the office a box of staples lay on my desk, nice!=) And my list of office-material is is getting longer and longer:

* Desk

* Laptop

* Desklamp

* Mouse

* Mousemat (with a picture of a moose on it)

* Shelves (having a picture of an 18-year old Marianne standing on the topshelf)

* Pinboard (with pins, thank you John)

AND

* Whiteboard!!! So now I can properly organize my daily tasks.

Wonderful, I love whiteboards, they have some kind of logical, organized and sophisticated touch about them. I´m glad that some object in my office can contribute to those things, since I can´t.

That´s all for today folks.

over&out

/sara