Coffee, fruit and cheese

Ah, Friday. As loyal readers of the Bombablog may have gathered, Sara, my erstwhile and erudite colleague, doesn't really like Mondays. I, on the other hand, don't much care for Fridays. It signals the end of the week and I rather enjoy my weeks at Bombadil. On the plus side though Friday does tend to be even madder than the rest of the week. Here is a brief outline of the sequence of events that occurred this morning.

• Everyone drinks coffee in the fika room, at 10 o'clock sharp, like good Swedes/psuedo Swedes
  
• Twenty minutes later, everyone gets up to leave the fika room to continue Bombadilling
• Niklas (upon inspecting the contents of his mug and with a genuine tone of surprise in his voice), comments: "Ah, I have not drunk any coffee, I have only eaten fruits."
• Everyone sits down again
• Niklas drinks coffee
• Swedish chi is restored
  

Our Media Centre is gathering pace (well, it is gathering staff at any rate). Veronica will be joining the Bombadil stable next Monday, hopefully she'll be able to put up with our horsing around in the fika room.

In other news, the Bombadil dog currently smells like cheese.*

*She smells of cheese bacause she stole several kilos of cheddar from the kitchen table last night.

Off to the royal capital of Sweden

Didn't have much time to blog today, since we are off to Stockholm to discuss international expansion and expansion capital. Not that Stockholm is the capital of capital, but there are some venture capitalists we are meeting there today. And the others at the office made sure I saw myself featuring instead of Barbara Andersson in Barbed Wire. Was it really Barb-ara Andersson? Weard bird, that one, at least the name. ;)
/Niklas

Wensday blogging

Hello again everyone!

Blogging time again and Pixie is not around at the moment. Probably because Ubbe is with me again this day. He is a bit "low" when he meets a new female dog :-)). But he will get use to her if he meets her a couple of more times. On the picture Ubbe is sitting under the table looking at John who is taking the picture.



Yesterday me and Marianne went to Örebro to talk to the headmaster at Örebro Art Shool. I know him from before when we both worked at the Åkerby sculpturepark. Marianne told him about Bombadil and we will keep in touch! We are happy that there will be an co-operation in the future.

Ohh, very soon Saras poetry book will be finished. We will do some work on it tomorrow and print it out to se how it looks. It will be intresting when we have the real book in our hands :-)).

By, by for now
Mari and Ubbe on the floor

Continental explosions, engagements, cream cakes and an unrelated picture

This week - and today was no exception - we have had several howls in the office. Not wolf-like howls, but jubilant, exhilarating, happy screams of, well, exhilaration. We now have a presence on every continent on the globe. I know there are not that many continents, but it was indeed a milestone for us and the number of countries in which we have a presence has risen to 19. There is a map on the website for those of you interested in the updates. However, the reason being on all continents was such an important milestone is that it means that the Bombadil concept has not only been accepted but also appreciated by writers from disparate backgrounds and cultures, making it a universal concept.

There are obviously many differences between the authors but there are so many things that unite these young people, their passions and their dreams and that really pleased me. It also pleases me that they are so talented, motivated and passionate and on a personal note, it pleases me that there is so much to learn from the generation ready to take over running the world. I have a lot of faith that they will make it a wonderful place in which to grown old. Yes, I am not quite old yet (according to my definition though not that of my children), but I look forward to the day, with these many talented young beings at the helm.

Another jubilant cry was when we heard that the Crown Princess was getting married to her Daniel. In my eyes, there is very little more endearing that watching love dance in the eyes of newly engaged couples. My sincere congratulations to them, and I hope I will one day be able to tell them so in person. Sweden is a small place, so it might well happen. Until then, congratulations Victoria and Daniel.

Another jubilant cry was when we realised it was cream cake day. It is the last day before lent, and traditions proclaim that one is allowed to eat copious amounts of cream cake. I only managed one, but it was very good indeed. I could not manage more than one, but neither would I need more than one to make it though lent :-(

Now on to something completely unrelelated to jubilant howls, though I was rather jubilant about it. I just realised that it was Sara who had taken over my kitchen duty because she had forgotten to blog yesterday. I was so busy yesterday that I did not even check (I usually enjoy catching up with my colleagues thoughts by reading their blogs) and today I was very surprised that coffee was made and that the kitchen was spick-and-span. I actually just thought that somebody had taken pity to my workload and done it for me. Regardless of the reason, I am pleased not having had to do it: Thank you Sara.

And in case anybody wonders, the dog is cuddly and lovely! I have a cold, so I cannot comment on the smell.

Monday blogging on a Tuesday morning....

I give up, I surrender and I confess: I FORGOT. Ok, happy now? I forgot to blog yesterday, Monday is my holy day you see, I blog and I have kitchen duty. Both was more or less forgotten yesterday, I did manage to put on some coffee, but forgot to do the washing up (I did it this morning). For anyone who is not very familiar with the routine of kitchen duties at Bombadil Publishing shall now be enlightend:

"During one´s kitchen-duty-day one shall make sure that breweries such as coffee and tea is available at 10.00 am and at 15.00 pm. One shalla also keep the kitchen neat, clean and tidy"
I´m embaressed to admit that I failed yesterday. One can not succeed every Monday I guess.

After all it was a very productive Monday yesterday, the weather was maybe not at it´s best, but I don´t mind, everyone knows that Mondays has the delegation of being the weekday with crappy weather, that just how the world works. Today is beutiful though, snowy, sunny and freezing. Yeah, we still got winter for sure. I´m waiting for spring, I know it might be a bit early for expecting spring in February if you are located in the midlands of Sweden, but as a wise man or woman once said "Hope is the last to surrender".

As I said, yesterday was a productive Monday, indeed! It involved doing the setting for my book "Where´s the manual", which was great fun, Mari is really awsome and is helping me out a lot=)
I got a new collection of poems which I´ve been going through and the day finished off with me and John runing around the town church of Nora to get the last pictures for my book. Well John was taking lots and lots of artistic photographs whilst I was on the phone. But still, a very productive Monday, indeed.

Dancing the can't-can't

The neighbours invited us over for dinner last night. I know that this is a blog of office news and that dinner with the neighbours is not, strictly speaking, office news, but most of us were there and it did mean that we were all slightly more sedate this morning than we might otherwise have been. I tend to judge the success of a dinner by the number of different drinks that are served at the table and let me assure you this particular culinary event was absolutely excellent.



And now an apology. Sara has been responsible for editing the Bombadil Shorts this week. It turns out that I do rather a lot of singing and dancing in front of the camera, usually whilst wielding power tools and other manly paraphernalia. I have no idea why and generally don't realise that I'm doing it. If I'm editing, I consign it to the Bombadil dustbin. However, Sara has decided that me shaking it with a cordless drill is what the public are baying for and consequently Youtube's servers are groaning under the (metaphysical) weight of scores of video clips featuring my rather dire dancing. You all have my most sincere condolences and rest assured it was NOT my idea!

In other news, the Bombadil dog currently smells like fermenting herring.

Count on things getting lost

Thursday again, weeks fly fast don't they?

Well, it seems I haven't done much of use this week, but maybe I can just call it winter holiday? Most of yesterday, for example, I spent looking for a control card for the computer. I bought it last year for making a weld metal deposition robot for the moon-mine analogue. It has not turned up after the move, so I spent a lot of time going through the remaining ununpacked boxes. Without success - I must have put it somewhere very safe. Have found the old computer I intend to use, and all other bits and pieces collected for the purpose so far. Still missing is one control card and one stepping motor. Some other stuff I had thought hopelessly lost turned up, though, including my collection of strategic computer games, and my comptometer (see picture). The comptometer is a patented contraption, that is capable of adding 8 digit numbers, it has a movable decimal point, and I believe there's a way of also subtracting 8 digit numbers, though I am not sure how, since the manual was lost before I procured it. I didn't buy it new, you see, but in a rather worn state in a country auction. I bid on a box of miscellanea, but was aggressively overbidden by a man with a passion for a hammer or some other tool also in the box. But as I approached him after his claiming the lot, he unexplicably had no interest in the gem of his find and donated the comptometer to me.

It has been a valuable addition to my office ever since.