short-lived sun

byebye.

summer

or the rare autumn day.

(i love waking up to blue skies)

having not seen the sun in over a week, it's good to know that he's hanging around.

off to make the most of the beautiful weather!

thanks j!

finally picked up my stuff (inherited from j) from d, his nice swedish friend. when j told me to have someone help me carry everything back to where i'm staying, i scoffed and told him off for doubting my capabilities. looks like i'd to eat my words when i couldn't even manage lifting aforementioned stuff from the storage cage to the storeroom door! and then came the most embarrassing part of distributing the weight between the hideous ikea bag and my backpack. so i sat morosely in the empty parking lot looking very much like a jilted (and evicted!) lover who was sent packing with only the clothes on her back and whatever she could fill the bag with in his hurry to turf her out. talk about attracting strange stares from the other residents who were none too pleased to find a suspicious character sorting through a mountain of barang and obstructing their path to the subway.

but i finally made it back to home base, despite taking a wrong turn on the subway and ending up somewhere even more ulu than i'm already staying. oops.

disgruntled sherpa-esque rant aside though, i'm looking this little gem! it's a fan that blows hot hair. a bit like a standing hairdryer. keeps me nice and toasty in the summer chill. don't you foresee my fan and i becoming bosom buddies through winter? apparently this isn't even close to cold yet...

warmth

met with j for tea. he's just come out of self-imposed home quarantine (because he's civic-minded that way) and i needed to get the oracle(s) from him, as well as d's address, the nice boy who is guarding my (soon-to-be) stuff in the interim. thank god i can move into j's stockholm life, if only possessions-wise, and am very fortunately inheriting, among other things, a heater, kettle, textbooks and notes.

but the take-home from tea that really really excited me was the prospect of my very own sauna. well, 'very own' is a bit of a stretch but apparently everyone and their mother has a sauna in sweden, and where i'm staying is no exception. this personal sauna is now an integral part of my body heat conservation plan come winter! in fact, i might just hibernate in the sauna and emerge in spring.

equally importantly, i now have the names of and directions to the asian grocers (absolutely crucial) and am relieved to find out that there are communal washers and driers, albeit of the non-human kind, in the building. things are shaping up! now i just need to decide if it's practical to go to stockholm armed only with a dutch oven and the set of clothes on my back. because the 20kg weight limit is forcing me to choose between being warm and being full. while i'm certain i can buy clothes there and not a dutch oven, i'm equally certain that i can cook with another pot.

and so the p(l)ot thickens...