Continue reading »]]> This post is dated February 17 because that’s the date I actually attended the event described. But it wasn’t posted until February 22 at the request of the friend who invited me to said event. (I suspect the “pre-opening social media blackout” rule only applied to Starbucks employees, but whatever.)

So tonight Dr. Darling and I got to hang out at Malmö’s newest coffee shop a full five days before its grand opening.

The Starbucks in the city’s historic train station building is one of only 3 of the Seattle juggernaut’s franchises in Sweden. (The first was opened at in Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport in 2010 and the second in Gothenburg‘s central station just last month.) The event was invitation-only and designed to give all the newly-trained baristas a chance to practice on a friendly and familiar bunch of customers. It was a lot of fun. I especially enjoyed the coffee tasting, which paired a number of different brews with a variety of foods and flavors, some of them quite unexpected.

I was a little disappointed to learn, however, that the only coffee they would be serving regularly is their milquetoast Pike Place Roast, which was formulated specifically for the American palate and launched in 2008. I’ve always been firmly in the camp that thinks Starbucks over-roasts their beans, but I still long for the days when they offered a choice of a couple different coffees each day, usually their house blend and something bolder.  After living in Sweden for a year, I always ordered the bold brew, so I would not be surprised if the average Swede found Pike Place Roast on the weak and watery side.

The station venue is really nice though, very open and spacious compared to pretty much every other coffee shop in town, including the two Espresso Houses in the Central Station. Their prices are comparable to Espresso House as well, something I figured would have to be the case for them to succeed here. Plus there will be free wifi.  I can easily imagine myself going for fika there on a regular basis.

Continue reading »]]> Valentine’s Day is a very low-key holiday here in Sweden, which is nice if you’re not “partnered up” or in my case, married to the world’s most unromantic Swede.

So with romance off the table, I settled for some warm wishes from colleagues and fun links from several of my Tweeps. This image is  from a very clever collect at 10,000 Words.

And this one is from NPR.org:

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First semla of 2012

A colleague decided we needed to have “semlor” for fika today, and who was I to argue with Swedish tradition?

Semlor are basically whipped-cream sandwiches made with unsweetened cardamom-spiced buns that have been spread with almond paste and sprinkled with powdered sugar. They were originally eaten on Shrove Tuesday as a last splurge before the start of Lent, but these days they start showing up in bakeries shortly after the first of the year and are available all the way through Easter.

According to Wikipedia, the average Swede will eat five of them in that time period, and the one I had today is about half the size of a usual semla (the singular form of the Swedish word). I was actually really excited to learn that the bakery behind our office building offers a “mini-version”, because it’s all about the ratio of almond paste to whipped-cream as far as I’m concerned.

This one was pretty much PERFECT.

Continue reading »]]> Though Dr. Darling may beg to differ, we have a fairly even distribution of labor when it comes to household chores getting done at The Penthouse Nordic. We’ve gotten into a comfortable routine that has us each focusing on the tasks we’re best at or mind the least. For example, I do the majority of the meal-planning and cooking while the methodical Swede tackles most of the deep-cleaning jobs and handles our banking and bill-paying.

We take turns with the weekly laundry detail; I do it on the Saturdays that Dr. Darling is working, and she does it on the Mondays of her alternating three-day weekends. Though it’s not exactly even-steven because there are usually 9 days of dirty clothes accumulated for her laundry day and only 5-days worth for mine, which is why I always strip the bed and wash sheets and pillow cases on my Saturdays.

The other inequity to this schedule has to do with the facilities. There are three laundry rooms in the basement of our building, but the quality and efficiency of the equipment varies significantly between them.  The one closest to our apartment (oddly designated as #5 despite being 1 of 3) happens to have the newest washers and tumble dryer, which makes it much in demand … especially on weekends. But because the new-ish high-tech yet pain-in-the-@$$ electronic booking system will only allow us to reserve one laundry room once per week, the Saturday morning slot for No. 5 has invariably been claimed by the time Dr. Darling finishes her turn on Monday.

This means I end up in No. 3, which features one machine so ancient that you have to spin your clean wash in a separate centrifuge before putting it in the equally antique one-temperature-&-timed-cycle-fits-all tumble dryer or hanging them in the drying room. So even though there is less to wash on MY laundry day, it’s a lot more labor-intensive.

This past Monday was Dr. Darling‘s turn, but when I got home from work, something prompted me to inquire how the task had gone that morning. It was an odd question for me to ask … I mean, how much can go wrong in the luxury of Laundry Room No. 5?

“Just fine,” was the answer, followed by: “I was able to reserve the good laundry room for you on Saturday.”

Shazz: Honey! I KNEW you were going to say that!

Dr. Darling: Well I always try to get No. 5, but it’s hardly ever free by the time I’m done.

Shazz: I mean I *knew* you had gotten it today!  It was like a premonition! Sometimes I’m really quite psychic at times.

Dr. Darling: What a shame to have wasted this amazing ability on our laundry booking.

Clearly being psychic does not trump a perennial case of bad timing.

Continue reading »]]> I love avocados but rarely buy them because I don’t have the patience to wait for them to get ripe. Or maybe it’s just that I’m a poor planner.

In any case, when I see avocados in the produce section of our local grocery store, I’ll often give a couple of them a feel on the outside chance I come across one that’s actually going to be ready to eat sometime in the next 24 hours. That hardly ever happens.

So naturally I was completely jazzed to come across this “food hack” that eliminates the need to wait:

Does this not look INSANELY delicious?! Since you bake the egg directly in the avocado half, it’s actually preferable that it be a little under-ripe. I cannot WAIT to try this. 

Complete instructions are available in this lifehacker post.

Continue reading »]]> Earlier this month I shared a video of President Obama singing the opening strains of the Al Green classic “Let’s Stay Together” during a fundraiser in Harlem‘s Apollo Theater. His performance was so good that even some Republican-leaning members of my very musical extended family expressed delight in it.

Well, the Obama 2012 Campaign is nothing if not tech-smart and media-savvy, so now Barack’s silky smooth vocals (interspersed with the audience’s reaction) can be downloaded as a ringtonefrom the campaign website.

Image via Wikipedia

Of course I had to have it. After all, the lyrics “I , I, I, I’m so in love with you…” would make for the perfect ringtone for Dr. Darling!

And then I remembered that the Swede never calls me.

Seriously, if we’re talking to each other on the phone, there’s a 99.9% chance that I’m the one who did the dialing. If I EVER want to actually hear this ringtone, I’m going to have to assign it to somebody besides my spouse.

So for the time being, I’ve decided to assign the singing President ringtone to my best Swedish buddy the Alpha Geek. He may not be in love with me and he’s definitely not eligible to vote in the 2012 US election, but at least he calls regularly.

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Salted sidewalk outside the Radio Sweden studios in Malmö.

‘Old Man Winter‘ has finally decided to make an appearance in southern Sweden, in terms of temperature at least. It’s been below freezing off and on for the better part of a week now, prompting street crews to lay down pretty patterns of salt overnight on what I presume are walkways that are known to give pedestrians trouble when the temperature drops.

I say *presume* because quite frankly, I cannot see any rhyme nor reason as to how the sidewalks that get salted are selected.

For example, on my walk to work this morning, there was plenty of salt on the walkway outside the Malmö studios of Radio Sweden, which is under a portico (hence, completely DRY) that stretches for almost an entire city block. Yet the wide, slightly elevated and much-used pedestrian bridge over Södra Förstadskanalen (one of the city’s many canals), which is fully exposed to the elements all night long, got zero, zip, nada, NONE.

So now I’m wondering if the street crews responsible for salting the sidewalks of Malmö are incompetent, or just have a really evil sense of humor.

Continue reading »]]> While it may surprise some readers of this blog, I actually do have a real job at a large, multinational company headquartered in Sweden. Because of the aforementioned “multinational”-ness, our official corporate language is English, something for which I am truly grateful as it has allowed me to be employed as a communications professional in a country where I am only passably fluent in the native language. (Whoda thunk it?!)

This means that all communication material generated at HQ here in Sweden is created in English first and then translated into as many as a dozen other languages depending on where it’s going to be used. But occasionally it happens that information originating at one of our subsidiaries (in the local language, naturally) needs to be distributed outside of the “home” country and then the process is reversed … except that the need for an English version can sometimes be an after-thought and therefore, a “rush job.”

Image via Wikipedia

I suspect this was the situation the other day when my boss (a Swede) asked me to try to “clean up the English” in a document that had obviously been converted directly from Italian with Google Translate … a fantastic tool that I freely admit to using multiple times a week. But as amazing as Google Translate is, it does not handle all languages equally well.

In this particular case the English text did not even make enough sense for me to be able to clean it up (in spite of the fact that I had a general idea of what it was supposed to be about). The document went back and forth between me, my boss and our Italian colleagues several times before we were comfortable that we had the message right. It honestly would have been faster and easier for me to have written the text from scratch.

Later I was cc’d on an e-mail from my boss to the Italian team suggesting that the next time they need a document in English, they should consider looping me in at the beginning of the process, thereby taking advantage of my skills as a “native American.”  I’m pretty sure I snorted tea out of my nose when I read it.

It was a completely understandable and fairly hilarious mistake for a non-native English speaker to make, so naturally I had to share the story with Dr. Darling, who has been known to make a malaprop or two. The Swede agreed with me that I should probably have a “native American” name to go along with my Pirate Name (Captain RumJugs McScurvey) and we spent a good chunk of the evening coming up with appropriate-sounding monikers, including “Writes Like the Wind”, “Edits on Eagle’s Wings” and my personal favorite, “Dances With Words.”

But knowing my personality as she does, Dr. Darling is lobbying hard for “Sitting Bull-shit.”