No shooting stars for us tonight, though I can see a glimmer of clear sky near the horizon at the outer edges of the solid cloud cover that blankets us. It’s cold out, too, dipping down into the lower teens (Celsius), a chill reminder that summer is fleeting and layers are essential in this northern clime.
It’s been an up and down day of really good things and bummers of the lighter variety. A friend I see much too seldom had to cancel our get-together plans for spending the evening talking non-stop. I had an excellent sushi lunch with brief_therapy (another friend I see too seldom). I got lots of things done at work today. The artichokes I fixed for dinner tasted weird and had a strange consistency to the leaves, so we ended up not eating them: what a waste!
Then, Martin and I spent a hilarious hour and a half working on putting together a tipsrunda for the crayfish party we are hosting next weekend. We laughed our heads off, so much so that I gave myself a headache and had to medicate. Now that’s funny!
A tipsrunda or tipspromenad seems to be a uniquely Swedish tradition, and it doesn’t seem to be easily translatable, at least not literally. It’s basically a quiz gone walkabout. Runda means round, circuit, tour or walk. Swedes do tipsrundas during school field trips, at parties, at scout gatherings, whenever & wherever. A tipsrunda consists of 10+ questions, plus a tie-breaker question, each separately printed on a piece of paper and hung up along a given route, often outside. Each participant is given a piece of paper to fill in their name and answers on, and the one with the most right answers wins (sometimes a prize, sometimes just the honor of winning).
The questions are ALWAYS in multiple choice format and there are ALWAYS three answers to choose from. If you are creating a tipsrunda with a Swede and try to put more choices you will be quickly smacked down. And the answers are ALWAYS numbered like this:
1
X
2
not
A
B
C
or
1
2
3
The X is sacrosanct and MUST be included. I haven’t found anyone, in 14.5 years, who could explain to me the origin or reasoning behind the 1 X 2 format.
Anyway, it was a good thing Martin was helping me, since I had to do it all in Swedish and kept mispelling things and mistakenly typing å when I meant ä and vice versa. 😀
I have a habit of sending myself email reminders all the time. Appointments to put on the calendar, things to do, books to put on the wish list, things to remember to tell Anders, things to print out, etc. The other day at work I was talking with one of my American colleagues and she was lamenting that she didn’t have anyone to go see HP72 with. I said we hadn’t seen it yet and she was welcome to go with us, but I needed to find a free evening and would have to consult my calendar at home. So, while she was standing there, I sent an email to my home email with the subject line “Find movie date for Harry Potter” and in the body of the email I wrote:
And let Michelle know
Liz
And hit the Send button. Only to have her exclaim, “Did you just SIGN your email reminder to yourself??” and when I sheepishly replied in the affirmative, she laughed like a loon at me. I type too fast, you see, and I type a million emails a day, and it just flies off my fingers before I think.
I did it again just now, while sending the tipsrunda documents to myself at work to print out while Martin was watching, and again, I was laughed at like a loon. *sigh*
PS: If you are hosting a crayfish party and would like a copy of the tipsrunda (there are a couple of questions you will have to change out as they are Ek/Flyinge-specific), let me know!