Back in business

After a 3 year break I decided it was time to pick up this writing thing again. I'll try to fill you in on the rollercoaster that has been my life for the past few years.

First things first though after having had a few questions about this........
The midsummer celebrations have past and many wonder why I was at home doing some felting ( see here ) instead of celebrating.
Well Midsummer is one of the few times when my family and I feel we are outsiders, just like christmas eve for example. These are the holidays that most people spend with their families and/or closest friends and truth said..... we lack both. At least here in Sweden we do.
The family part is hard because most of them are still living in, or have just moved back to the Netherlands. The only family I have here is my dad and a sister ( the latter doesn't want to have anything to do with me....) Not much to build a great Midsummer celebration with.
When it comes to friends, well that's a different story. We do have friends of course,even if there are not that many.  Some we can even call close friends, but...... most of them celebrate with their own family/friends and we don't want to impose ourselves.
For the past few years we have tried to engage ourselves in the celebrations by helping binding the wreaths for maypole and taking part in the ceremony of raising that very pole, but after all that is done, we as a family are standing there alone, because we are still "outsiders", a feeling of  not belonging makes itself painfully clear.
This makes that we no longer go downtown to take part in this whole celebration, knowing that this of course doesn't make it better, but we skip the feeling of feeling like an outsider, not fitting in in the picture.
At home we can see and hear our neighbours with their gathered offspring dancing around their own little maypole having loads of fun together and we wish we could have that as well

Now don't get me wrong, I do not write this so everybody has to feel sorry for us.
I am fully aware that this is something we call concequence. It is one of the consequences of a choice we made ourselves. The choice  to leave everything we had back in the Netherlands and move to this beautiful country we now call home. But not all consequences are positive ones. The ones that have read my or my husbands scribbles in the past know what I am talking about. But we patiently wait for our kids to grow up and hopefully getting their own little families ....... and then we can have a Midsummer celebration with family and maybe som friends.

wreathbinding

 Another thing that I find very strange, and in some ways very desturbing, is that everybody here seems to feel that it is absolutely normal that 15 year old girls, or boys fot that matter, leave home to go study somewhere far away. This is quite a normal thing here in Sweden, obviously, but definitely not something I am accustomed to. Coming from a country with a substantially different educational system, where kids don't leave the parental home until they go to  University or Högskola, because everything else is in the near vicinity, makes it hard to grab when my "little girl" of 15 years young is going to leave home for the city of Uppsala to study. It goes completely against my feelings to let her go, but I know I must. To love is to let go. But in this case it scares the hell out of me.

To tell me then that "That's life" doesn't make things better. It has not been life for my whole life but all of a sudden I am confronted with the fact that this is what life looks like over here. I need comforting words telling me that she is going to be fine and going to make it on her own in that big city. I need to hear that nothing bad is going to happen, but............ looking at daily life, daily headlines in the newspapers on how our society is developing gives me the creeps. Letting my 15 year old daughter go out alone in that society is not just a cup of tea for me. And I don't understand how it can be a cup of tea for any other parent, but when I look and listen around, nobody seems to be making it into a big thing.
Am I an overprotecting parent, I don't think so actually. Please enlighten me.

I'm not made for this......

After working in Home care for about a month, I have to admit for myself that I am not made for this.
Various reasons make that I feel that way. Let's see if I can explain.
In my working life at the police I have been dealing with all kinds of people, young, old, criminals, drug addicts, mentally ill, respectful and respectless people
Back then I already felt it hard to have to deal with elderly people. When I got the offer to work in home care with the elderly I, of course, had my doubts, but was also thinking that I should at least give it a try. Maybe with the years I had grown a little, you never know.
Well...... I thought wrong. I find it extremely hard to keep my patience when they start nagging about things I can not do anything about. It gets even harder when I try to explain that and they just don't want to listen and keep getting more and more on my nerves. I have kept my cool so far, but don't know how much longer I am able to.

Of course not all the elderly nag. There are also cases where the person in question is the sweetest, but where the visits are so emotionally charged that I have a hard time letting go. When a 94 year old woman starts to cry because she can't find things in her own house because "they" have put it somewhere else....... where "they" is us caretakers, ........ where I see people just lying and waiting for the end to come on a daily basis. Where people with various forms of dementia don't have any control over their thoughts or emotions. In those cases I have a very hard time to let it go when I go home at the end of the day. It just keeps going through my head, how sad these situations are, without me being able to change it or do anything about it. It drains my energy.

And then there is  this caretaking part. I have no training or education in care or caretaking. Don't know much about sicknesses and their symptoms, yet it is expected of me to give medication, recognize changes in syndromes and symptoms and other medical stuff. I do not feel comfortable doing that without a proper training. And caretaking does also mean I have to clean diapers, empty pisscans/bottles, put special tight stockings over feet that ere affected by various diseases and very untasteful looking. Now I do have 3 children and changed a lot of diapers, but that is nothing compared to wiping an elder's buttocks or emptying a tupperware container with morning pee. Or cleaning up a bunch of snot after a terrible sneeze.
I have dealt with drug addicts going cold turkey and homeless people that hadn't seen a shower in half a year ( or longer), but this is worse, this gives me terrible vomiting urges.
And everything is done under pressure of time. I have about 7 to 9 visits a day, all on a tight time schedule, where traveling time between "clients" are calculated behind an office desk on google maps with no traffic indicators taken into consideration. When google maps says it takes 9 minutes without traffic, then we are supposed to get from A to B in 9 minutes with traffic. so basically you go in overtime every single day, or you have to take time of from your clients. Either way..... not good
I just have to face it, it takes a special kind of person to do this kind of work. And I am not one of them.

Then there is this other thing........ me and bosses, we do not match really well apparently. At least not with the last two. On this job, after having had a lousy introduction of one day, I went out alone for a couple of days. Then I had a day off to get my eyes examined ( I'll spare you the details of the why and how) and the morning after I woke up with an exploding headache. I took some pills and thought about going to work anyway, but since I had double vision I decided not to hop in the car and take all the risks in traffic. I had to search to find the number to call,  to call in sick at work. (remember my intro, well nobody told me anything about anything of those kind of things) when I called it was just after seven and I was supposed to be there at eight. I did realise I was a tat bit late, but what I did not expect was to be yelled at by my boss. I apologized a dozen times and even offered to come in and start the rounds so that they had the time to find someone to take over after me, but all she did was yell. But I got to stay at home, but without the usual "hope you get well soon" wishes of course.
I didn't feel well before I called, felt much worse after. This is not the way to treat your personnel in my opinion. But it gets worse, The next day she rang again and started questioning my work ethics, said she had a feeling from the beginning that she was going to have problems with me, that she was making calls all around to search for personnel so that her permanent employees could have their holiday and she had worked with personnel in many years...........
Now she probably forgot she wasn't dealing with an 18 year old scared girl but with an actual adult with a little bit of life experience (note the sarcasm.....).
So I countered, that if she had bad feelings about me from the start, she shouldn't have hired me in the first place. That if she was looking for personnel this late for the holidays, she should be thankful for every single person that wants to help out. And that the simple fact that she has worked with personnel in many years not automatically means that she's good at it........
Maybe I should not have said that ........... but on the other hand .... why not, the truth must be said, even if it hurts.
But you do understand that this is not a good basis for a healthy Boss/Employee relationship.

All this combined made me decide I can't go on in with this job, for my own sake.
I have worked a job I hated for the last couple of years and do not want to go their again. It's not good for my health or for my family. And thus I had a civilized conversation with my boss, where I explained all of the above and told her I wanted to quit.
She understood and agreed it was best for both parties, but asked if I would be so kind to stay untill she had found someone to replace me. Now I am not the worst person in the world so I agreed to that. Even if it takes longer then expected...... I'll be working until the end of the month.....

So back to application letters and CV's and hoping I'll find something on my path that suits me better.
In the mean time I will be putting my energy in my creativity and let that flow free. It sometimes gives surprisingly good results.

My ever changing life

Did I tell you earlier about the winds of change? Well it seems they are carrying on ever stronger.
As I told you before, I started working as a Personal assistant for Livihop for a couple of nights per month and it is a most satisfying job. But unfortunately not enough to be able to sustain a family. Even though I have already worked more shifts then initially intended. But two weeks ago I got a phonecall from my dear friend Ronny, asking how my job situation was looking at that moment. I explained it to him of course. Then he told me he had given my telephone number to his boss and she would probably ring to me sometime during the evening. Seems they were a little short on personnel. So, at home I sat and waited and only one hour later I was called by Dala Omsorg's boss and asked if I would be interested in working in home care services for the summer? It sounded interesting and we agreed to meet on the monday after that. One day later I got asked if I could hop in for an extra night shift from sunday to monday as personal assistant. How could I refuse,........... not thinking about the meet on monday.......
But all went right and directly after my night shift I drove off to another office to talk about another job.
Views, Ideas and wishes were exchanged and about 45 minutes later I walked out with a second job.
It struck me right there and then how the odds can change over time. Here I was, after almost four years of looking and applying for  jobs, never getting anything else than just being the cleaninglady, I suddenly had two jobs I didn't even have to apply for but were sort of just handed out to me.
Simply Unbelievable.

Then there are developments at the handicraft side of my life as well. I submitted a few of my creations to a local exhibition where about 15 handicrafters show their work together. The exhibition is organised by our local Hembygdsförening (best translation I can come up with here is a Local Historical/Folklore Society ) at our Hembygdsgården (homestead sort of thing)

fairy mobile

Spring Angel

The opening of the Exhibition was at Midsummer's Eve in combination with the celebration of that exact event. Lot's of people took the opportunity to take a peak and even though I was not present myself,  I did hear that a lot of positive comments were made on my creations. That, of course, made me happy.

But that is not all.  Ron has a co worker, who is very handy when it comes to creating things in leather. She makes the most beautiful horses saddles, but also interiors for old timer cars, purses, belts and all kinds of other things (you can look here if you're interested). She is a member of a crafts collective of nine crafts(wo)men, each with their own speciality. It is called Blå Snigel and they have a little boutique in Falun. Now Jill wants to hop off and was wondering if I might be interested in taking her place. That of course, sounds very promising. Of course she had to talk about it with the other members and to be able to show them what kind of things I create, I send her a couple of pictures.

They were received very well and thus my next move was to visit the boutique and get some answers to my questions about the how everything was functioning, what the costs would be ( running a boutique in downtown Falun is not for free I can guarantee) and so on.
After listening to what Jill told me and thinking it over for a second (didn't need much longer really) I decided I'd go for the trial membership for four months. Just to see if it meets my expectations and if I fit in the group of people that shape this collective. Of course I had to talk to the chairwoman of the collective, so I gave her a call and talked for a while. We agreed  I would start the first of august. For me it means I have a chance to show people what I create. Since I will be standing in the boutique for at least two days per month I will have near contact with the buyers. Time will tell if I will make money out of this and if it will be enough to cover the costs of the boutique. I know I will do my very best to make it a success, nothing more I can do really.

A stroll through the garden

Midsummer, that's what they say it is right now. But to be honest...... it doesn't really feel like that. With temperatures reaching no higher than 10 degrees celsius it seems more like early spring to me. Nevertheless the garden is developing into a colorful painting which I most certainly enjoy to the fullest. Even the veggies which I sowed are all showing their little heads above the soil, so it means we can at least eat fresh carrots, beets and salads this year. For now I will stop talking and show you what beauties I found in my little piece of paradise. Couldn't help myself, having a decent camera means you have to put it to good use........

 Beautiful Lilac

A bunch of wild flowers

Our Idea of creative gardening

No idea what, but beautiful it is

Cowslip in it's various color stages

         

Buttercup with feeding bugs

Wild Strawberry blossom

A special kind of Daffodil

And of course there are always a couple of other beauties roaming the garden, always looking for a place to lie down and rest after their obligatory mousehunt. 

Karel the Great

Eddie the Dark

To love is to let go

That's what I have learned over the years anyway. But in the case of being a teacher and having the same class for three years it must be incredibly difficult to let go. Last week my oldest daughter Annalena graduated from sixth grade. A bit of a special moment, where you realise your little girl is no longer a little girl.  She has had the most wonderful teacher a child could wish for or a parent could wish for his/her child. His name is Gunnar Albinsson.  A teacher who always saw the possibilities in a child, the positive and always worked to bring out the best in every child. And he was good at it as well. A teacher with humor but who could also be strict when needed. And his class followed his every lead. He always said they were the most wonderful bunch of kids. It even came to be that he put his class to work and was about to do some work of his own which included cutting paper with scissors, but he actually was afraid to use the scissors because it made to much noise and it would disturb his students in their work, so he just didn't.  I guess this has been an ideal combination of teacher and class. And my daughter was fortunate enough to end up in this class when we moved to this country, this village.
Now my not so little anymore daughter is going yet another step further, going to school in the city next year. So even for me it's time to let go a little more. But thanks to this wonderful teacher I feel confident that she'll manage.
A teacher like that needs to be given a special goodbye present, so me and the other classmom juggled a little with ideas and we came to a combination of both his passions. He liked playing golf, and was intending to do much more of that after retirement and he has a passion for beer, not the kind you drink on festivals, but real beer. So we got him a giftcard to Oppigårds brewery, one of the absolut best breweries around, where he can have dinner and a tour through the brewery and taste the beers they brew. The link to his golfpassion was done in an entirely different manner. I was provided with a wooden plank, took my woodburners, went to school and asked all the kids in his class to write their name with a pencil and then burn it into the plank. After that I searched for some pictures of golfers to use to burn into the plank as well and a picture of a golf course. I set to work and this was the end result.

But I wasn't finished. My daughter had asked already a while ago if i couldn't make an Angel for her as a present just from her to her teacher. Of course I could not refuse that request. She set out to find out what his favorite colors were and  I made the Angel she wanted.  

In the days running up to the yearclosing ceremony we noticed the tension in our daughter was growing, up to the point where she finally burst into tears. The idea of her class being torn apart and having to say goodbye to so many of her friends and her teacher was too much for her at that point. She knows it's a part of life, letting go, saying goodbye and she had done it before, but that doesn't make it easier.

                                                                                                       

Finally the day came and a beautiful ceremony it was in the church, They sang beautifully and finally got their certificates. I was taking pictures and looking through my lense it was like I was looking in the mirror, only 30 years back in time. Zooming in on her face,  I was shocked to see how much my Annalena looked like me. One doesn't really pay attention to it in normal daily life, but at that moment in time, zoomed in, it really struck me. 

Mirror to my past.

Afterwards there was this special little goodbye with the flagpole where the kids handed over the presents and a few more pictures were taken. After that it was down to the Hembygdsgården for a picknick with almost the whole class and Gunnar. We were very lucky with the weather and had a very cosy picknick before every said their last goodbyes and went home. 

Summer holidays have started, the time to let go is over, time to look forward to a new future. And thanks to wonderful Gunnar we have full confidence that she will thrive and do well at her new school. 

I just would like to say one thing to Gunnar, something he used to say to Annalena on her development assessment , only he used it in future tense, I'd like to use present tense. 

Gunnar, don't ever stop being who you are, it's the best you could ever be. 

Winds of change

No, I don't mean the renowned Scorpions song.
But changes are taking place all over my life at the moment.
One major change is that I am out of a job. Not that I am sad about  it. I am sensing a feeling a freedom, not having to go back to a job that I have hated from the day I started. A job I felt was utterly useless. To me that is, definitely not for the people I "serviced". They were all very satisfied with my work and even recommended me to others. No complaint has ever come from my clients. It's just that I would have expected more appreciation from my employer.
A job that was bad for my physical health and even for my mental health. Being diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis in my hands and finger joints, having to go around cleaning all day, including wringing, scrubbing, scraping, lifting and squeezing is not an ideal situation. That's the physical part. Mentally I felt doing this day in day out was dragging me down. Not in a sense of feeling less than someone else, but feeling sort of worthless because I knew I had so much more in me, All these capacities and all the experience I had build up in my years in the Dutch police force were going to waste, with me not being able to use them in a job that made sense to me, a job I felt had meaning. Because that is very important to me.  I just couldn't see the meaning in the work I was doing. It made me feel horrible.

So I ended up sitting home on sick leave, both for the physical and the mental part ( which had a little more attached than just the job part though ). And during the year that I have been at home, my employer was so kind to call ONCE, that's right, just once to ask how I was doing. Not very motivating to go back, I can assure you. I even applied for an office job when I found out there was an opening at the office (through external channels, cause they didn't tell me) Of course, I didn't get the job. Neither did I get it the second time there was an opening, because when I found out about that, it was already to late. All in all this made me feel that I was no longer welcome and it made me decide that it was time to take matters into my own hands. Since I am feeling better mentally and I can do other work there is no need for me to be on sick leave any longer. Which the Försäkringskassan ( the authority that pays my sickness benefits) fully agrees with. In a meeting with all three parties present, plus my doctor, it was decided that my contract would be ended by the first of june with mutual consent.
And although I have been looking and applying for jobs for as long as I have been living in Sweden ( more on that in a separate post), I did not manage to find something else...... yet. This means of course that I will be subjected to rules and regulations of the unemployment agency (Arbetsförmedlingen) to be able to get my unemployment benefits. This will not be easy and I'm probably going to have to bite my tongue quite a number of times, but all is better than going back to something you hate and I refuse to give up.
A little bit of luck I already had. Through one of my choir friends I embarked in the world of personal assistants. Meaning that I work two 12 hour nights per month as a personal assistant. And I am glad to tell you that it is giving me an awful lot more satisfaction compared to my previous job. It isn't easy, but it has so much more meaning.

Another major change is the fact that hubby Ron did manage to get a job. A fulltime job that is. And even though it is only a seasonal job, it means so much to him. He finally feels he is contributing and taking care of his family. No longer having the feeling that he is utterly useless and living at my expense. After being unemployed since we got here, without any benefits he was starting to give up hope. He became a bit of a "sourpuss" as we call it. A bit of a younger aged Walter ( if you know Jeff Dunham you know what I am talking about).

 But now he gets to do what he loves, gardening,  and gets paid for it. He even got some nice colleagues he gets along with. It's a win win situation. He feels good, I feel good the whole family feels good.

Cause let's face it, if one feels unhappy it does affect all the others in the family as well. So my Walter is more or less turning into a happy Peanut again.

And then of course there is the seasonal change. It never ceases to amaze me, how the world transforms when winter turns to spring. When life returns in all that lives, including ourselves. As much as I love winter with its magnificent landscapes and its serene silence, it is always a joy to see life returning.

From this.........

To this...

When the first snowdrop lifts its head above the melting snow, when the first birds return from their winter hide outs, when sap streams in trees start to go upwards again, with that the returning of the many different shades of green to the landscape. The season of growth has arrived and with it our growing desire to finally be able to start with our vegetable- and fruit garden. Fruit trees have been bought and planted,  Cherry and prunes. Organic seed purchased and waiting to be sown. Ron is working hard to get the plant beds in order.

We share a part of our seeds with my parents and dad is sowing the vulnerable veggies, that are to planted outside later, at their place, where there is more room. I can't wait to start sowing and then watch things grow, knowing that after the harvest we will have a well stocked food cellar. But I am getting a head of things now.
Let's enjoy this lovely season of new beginnings first.

And for old times sake I'll leave you with the Scorpions anyway.

We're saved.......

For now that is.......
Yes, it's confirmed. You Swedes have to stand out with us even longer. Our life in Sweden is saved, at least for now. Thanks to my contact at the bank who put her all into helping us to get us a little breathing room to make it through the months ahead. In hope that at least one of us is going to find a (new) job.

She gave me a big compliment, she said "du kan koka soppa på en spik ". You Swedish people know very well what that means, but let me explain for those others what it means.
Literally it says I can make soup from a nail. It means more or less that I can make something out of nothing. In our case it means that we can make ends meet at the end of the month, with a family of 5, on an income of 14.354 swedish crowns = 1.575 euros
(and that includes child benefit [barnbidrag] and housing benefit [bostadsbidrag])
How do we do it ? Sometimes I really wonder, but there are some things you can do to save money that are actually very easy. I'll share some of these, maybe it helps someone else when they're in a bit of a tight spot someday.

First up:
Make a  menu for a whole week, (we write our menu on the fridge door with Whiteboard pens) and then make you grocery shopping list from that menu and what is missing in your pantry or freezer. It helps to make a menu using what's on sale in your favorite (or cheapest) supermarket.
Make sure, when you go out to do your grocery shopping, that your stomach is filled. A growling stomach is a killer for your wallet. It makes that you buy more than what's on your list because of the lovely smells and the way the alleys and products are placed in the supermarket. They have these very neat tricks they use to reap even more money out of your pockets then you intended or want to.

Second:
Buy second hand.
We buy almost everything that's not food related second hand, clothes, furniture, kitchen equipment. We love to go "på Loppis" A loppis is a second hand store or maybe even a flea market and there are lots of them around here. We have a few favorite ones where we know that we will succeed. Especially when it comes to clothes, it can be tricky when you go shopping with three kids, 2 of them in their teens.
But also other things like kitchen utensils are often very cheap. I like to use cast iron cookware, but buying a new kettle is incredibly expensive, yet I do have quite a number of those at home, thanks to the secondhand markets.
Nowadays you can even shop on Facebook. There are many selling pages and even pages where things are donated for free or maybe  to trade for something else. Benefit from it

Third:

price difference between normal and Eko

When you live on a very small budget and you do your groceries at the supermarket you'll certainly find out that cheap food is by definition not the healthy kind. The cheapest food mostly consists of fries, hamburgers, pizza and packages with lots of E-numbers on the ingredient list. Definitely not the kind of food you would want to stuff yourself with.Therefore if you have a garden, put it to good use and grow your own food. How you want to do this is your own choice, but we choose to do it Biologically/Ecologically. It pays to grow your own food. For one it just tastes a lot better then the stuff you buy in the supermarket, It is  rewarding and you know what you eat.
Of course you'll have to buy seeds, that may cost a little but when you see what it'll cost you to buy the fully grown vegetable in the supermarket, it is well worth the price.

 It may cost you a little more in a non-material way though.It'll take a lot of effort, persistence, patience and a very large dose of energy and hard work, but......... when you put a bit of homegrown broccoli in your mouth, you'll forget about all that.

Fourth:
Don't ever fall in the trap of buying things with money you don't really have.
It is so easy to buy something you wanted for so long on installment or creditcard. In they end you always pay much more then the thing is really worth. if you start on buying things on part-payment it will become a disease hard to get rid of.
It start with one item and a small amount per month, next month you see something else and another small amount is added, and so it will keep going on until all these small amounts have added up to become a huge amount which you no longer can pay up. We've fallen for that trap and payed dearly for it. If we really want something and it is over our budget, we simply save money until we have enough to buy it. And that is the only way.


And last but certainly not least:
Read this Book

First my husband read it and told me it would be a good idea if I would do the same. So I did, (I sometimes really do listen to what he has to say ;), not to often though )   and I can only conclude that he was absolutely right. It is a very inspiring book on how our monetary economy is consuming us, absorbing us humans.We are all chasing an ideal of wealth that is mostly material. People want to have more gadgets, more comfort, more money, a bigger house and once they obtained it......they're still not happy. They are a prisoner of their own mindless consumerism in which they have to work two jobs to be able to pay for the house they live in and to get all the stuff they want, having no time left to really enjoy or even use the things they obtained.
In this book the author Ben Hewitt himself goes through a transition  from this mindless consumerism to a thoughtful consumption through a friendship with another man who lives a happy life with almost no money. Instead of being a prisoner of the monetary economy, he is a man who sets a new standard for true happiness and wealth.
It is certainly not a book written in anger.  It is written with a good dose of humor in a very understandable language, even for those with absolute minor understanding of how economics work, like myself. As the writer is an American, the book looks mostly at the American society, but since the whole world is trying to be like America, it fits right in in our European society. I have certainly enjoyed reading this book and it sort of has given me the confirmation that our visions on money and economics are not so strange at all................