I haven’t done any blogging during the weekend, which mostly is because I just for once have had my computers turned off most of the time. The reason for that is that my mother have been visiting me over the weekend, and since my guest bed is located in the living room, the same room that houses all my not so quiet computers, so I thought it would be best to deactivate them for a while. It doesn’t happen very often, but apparently I can manage just well without computers for a couple of days like that, I guess that’s a good sign. The only disadvantage with having the computers deactivated is of course that the telephone stops working when I don’t have a network connection, but considering it is mostly my mother that calls me it wasn’t that a big loss...

No matter what I have had a nice weekend. On Friday I participated in my first surprise birthday party, when Geršur’s birthday was celebrated (a few days in advance, as she has gone on vacation now with her boyfriend, just in time for the actual birthday). Poor Geršur at first looked rather scared after coming in the door and having everyone screaming Surprise! at the same time, but after that she seemed to really enjoy it. It was mostly colleagues that were there, but still there were several interesting people to talk to, I don’t really get to talk to everyone at work, and when I do it’s mostly work-related anyway—it’s nice to meet and talk a bit more casually sometimes. Thanks to Divisha for throwing a nice party, even if she managed to forget to send me an invitation at first, she came by my office on Thursday asking Are you coming tomorrow?, which made me quite surprised as I hadn’t heard about it before. So it sort of was a surprise party for me as well, but that’s okay. With my mother out shopping downtown on Friday I managed to conjure up a gift anyway.

On Saturday it was time for the traditional (sixth year in a row!) trip up to Holmenkollen to watch the 50 km cross-country skiing. No Swedish medal this year either, but coming in fifth is not bad, either. No matter who wins, the atmosphere on the stand is just amazing, especially this year with a couple of Norwegians doing quite well during a large part of the race. The weather can often be a problem during the Holmenkollen weekend, two times the fog has been so thick that we were unable to see the bigscreens on the other side of the arena, but this year we had perfect winter weather—the sun was shining and it was about five to ten degrees below zero. Wonderful.

I didn’t do any board gaming with either of the two groups I usually play with, but it didn’t matter much, since my mother totally loves playing Carcassonne, so I got to play quite a lot during the weekend anyway, especially during the Sunday when we were quite tired. Hopefully that takes care of her withdrawal symptoms enough to survive to Easter, which is when I next plan to visit the old country...