I'm typing this on my smartphone while digesting an evening meal of ramen noodles, egg and Chinese Sauerkraut from the tin. I'm in our new house. It's a mess, boxes everywhere. My wife is having a foot bath. Juniorette is playing with legos in her room. Both are singing in Mandarin.
Yesterday a crew of about fifteen friends & family moved our stuff here -- many thanks guys! I am very proud to have so many good people in my life whom I can rely on.
Today my wife and I skipped work and spent the day getting things into order. I've done some washing and assembled two book cases and a high cupboard, so I guess a lot of the book boxes may get done quickly now.
Something that's really struck me about our new place is the view. You can see the sky from every window and from some even a far horizon. Orion waved goodnight to me last night as I entered our main door, and this morning the Nacka radio masts' pulsing lights greeted me when I got up in the morning darkness. Driving here is still an unfamiliar experience: all these low private houses with winter lamps in the windows, and at the end of the road one that's ours.
Our move from a council tenement to an area of small houses nearby lowers the former area's diversity in the sense that it just lost two middle-class people with desk jobs. As for ethnicity, our new area just got a little more integrated in the sense that it now has a few more non-Europid faces.
I feel a strange urge to buy a large pottery garden ornament. Not a gnome, more like an egg or sphere. Though my extra mom the interior designer tells me they have gone out of style.
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Cleaver woman, that extra mum of yours. I would suggest a trip to Halmstad (SW Sweden) where you can get an Eastern Island stone sculpture, concrete replica. That something to put in your garden in order to baffle the neighborhood!!
Sorry I missed the move, but I had a date with a plastic bucket. How about this for a garden ornament:
http://minipainting-guild.net/Reports/CJs_Cthulhu.html
Growing up in Skogalund, not too far from your house, the only thing I remember concerning garden ornaments, is the non-functional miniature wind-mill we had in our front yard. It fit very well with the house, in part since it was brown as the house, and in part since the house turned out to be non-functional too.
As for garden eggs. Were they ever in style? The only thing I can think of, is the installation "Bobos hjärta" (Bobo's Heart) at SLU in Alnarp. It's a humongous pastel green blob with smaller pastel coloured blobs attached to it. Not too pretty. Get a gnome instead. Or a black pentagram and a dead goat.
Mikael, you're a Nacka kid too!
I wonder if you can get a garden gnome shown at the moment when he sacrifices a goat within a pentagram. I'd go for that. Or a rustique version av Paddy's Cthulhu figurine, hewn out of a squamous, rugose, gibbous rock unknown to Terran geology.
If your family members are going to be singing in Chinese, why not decorate that garden with a little Chinese deity or fairy, too? There are the god and goddess of fields, tien gong di mu (the first character is like a box divided into four equal squares; the 2nd is like a V with the point lying down sticking to the left, with two diagonals over it; the 3rd is the word for earth, which maybe some kindly Chinese person can write for you, and the 4th is the word for mother); or the Melon Fairy, Gua Xien (who is written with a curving horizontal on top, two curving verticals on the outside, a vertical straight down in the middle and a slightly off-kilter horizontal on the bottom with a nick on the right; plus a little man standing on tip-toe beside two verticals with a crossbar at the top, plus a vertical that's a little taller down the middle beside him). Those are good patrons of agriculture. Or maybe you're prefer to Blue Dragon of Prosperity (Ching Long Ji Ching) or the Five Roads Wealth God (Wu Lu Cai Shen) -- anything with 5 in it is bound to be lucky. In fact, you could go all the way up to the God of Five Blessings (Wu Fu Da Shen) or even Guan Yin herself, that noble Buddhist goddess or Bodhisattva (depending on your outlook) who loves children so well and was male in India before she went east. Any of these are head and shoulders ahead of gnomes and Cthulhus any day in my book!
Thanks for suggestions! Me & wife are planning to check out Mr. Lee's wares in this department.