What makes us go ouch on Thursday mornings

One of the good things about having been such an unsporty kid for more than half of my life is that I still have the joy of discovering new sports. I was practically a benchwarmer in P.E. class; I was afraid of flying balls and I had (and think I still have) the coordination of a guy who has two left feet. Just to show what bad condition I had, I had a fever the day after the high school physical fitness test. And later on in high school, I only excelled in one "sport" – if you could even call it that – and it was something as odd as stiltwalking. They make you do weird stuff in girls' schools.

I have to thank anime for getting into any kind of training routine at all. If it weren't for Samurai X (featuring a reverse-sword weilding, red-haired samurai), I would not have gotten into kendo, which would not have led me to running and spinning, which in turn made me dare to learn how to ride a real bike. I couldn't dare imagine how sedate my life would have been without, ironically enough, watching anime marathons on TV.

It's a new year and I thought that I would finally learn how to swim. Instead (but not regrettably), I found myself trying out a new sport I haven't even heard of until I got to Sweden: innebandy a.k.a. floorball.

Practicing before the game. Forgive my un-floorball-like posture.

The best way to describe it is that it's like hockey, but not really. There's no ice, no skates, no body padding or helmets, no body checking, in our case no goalkeeper, and no puck. Instead of a puck, there's a white hollow ball (a "floorball ball"), to which we use correspondingly lighter, hollower versions of the hockey stick (a "floorball stick"). The basic rules are like any other ball game: run towards the opponents' goal with the ball and try for a goal. And in between: pass, steal, run, run, run.

Since it's my first time ever to try this sport, the guys let me in the court the whole time, except when I was drinking water and taking pictures (Hooray for the ex-benchwarmer!). Last week, there were a lot of players and I basically just jogged around with them for an hour trying to get a feel for the game. I shot an easy goal three-fourths into the game. I was happy, but to be honest, it wasn't spectacular because the scoreboard was already at 20+ on each side. This week, with just three players present on each side, I got to practice a bit more before the game started and got to be more involved in the game despite not having scored.

Floorball makes for great pictures! I'll show you while trying to explain this bit of the game:


Here's someone from the opposite team trying to hit the goal. Marcus (from my team) is lunging in the foreground. He's keeping an eye on Micke, the guy in black near the goal, who might try for a rebound in case the shot is missed. Keep an eye on Marcus. You'll see him again on the other side of the field later.


The ball dosn't go in and someone from our side has the ball. Everyone's spurting towards the other goal. Except that guy in white (on our team). It's good to have someone near our own goal in case the opposing team makes a successful steal. Or then again, maybe he was just tired. Running in spurts after the ball is unbelievably energy-draining. Throughout the game I had to remind myself that I actually had a chance of lasting the hour on my feet. Everybody was probably convincing themselves of the same thing, though by the end of the hour we were mostly just jogging.


The guy in stripes is in our team too. He's the one who ran the ball to our side and he tries for a goal. That small stripe on the ground is the ball. It looks like it will make it... but it dosn't.


Did you keep an eye on Marcus? Thankfully for our team, he was at the right side at the right time, so he gave the ball a push into the goal. Everything from start to finished probably happened in less than half a minute. Maybe even less than a quarter of a minute.

It's great to be able to try a sport this way – to try it yourself, to find out what works, get some tips, and (hopefully) improve. If it were kendo or any other martial art, I would have probably spent half of the hour cleaning the floor with my hands and feet and another half just doing "floorball footwork", finally getting into the game after 6 months of initiation-like rituals and indoctrination into the "floorball philosophy".

So, what makes us go ouch on Thursday mornings? Wednesday-night floorball. And having to bike the way back home.

It's 10:52 now on a Wednesday and I'm going to bed; it's going to be hard to get out of bed tomorrow morning. Ouch, my legs!

Gull-Britt's health bread

This recipe comes from Gull-Britt, who is one of Mat's and Margareta's neighbors in the countryside. She actually lives a good 20-minute walk away from where they live, but in the countryside, "neighbor" means anyone within a 3-kilometer radius.

Gull-Britt is a real master in the kitchen so I hear, and this bread really is "hers". She adapted it from a recipe that originally had only flour and wheat bran in it, turning it into a healthy bread with not less than 4 more kinds of seeds and grains. She also succeeded in making this bread fluffy despite all its grain- and seed content – for that, it has to yeast in the refrigerator overnight + 1 more hour outside of it. If you have the ingredients available to you (I know it calls for some exotic ingredients that may be hard to find in other countries), try it! It's actually the only thing labeled "health bread" that Marcus will touch. And eat. He otherwise calls seeds "bird food", so the fact that he will eat these is another way of saying that this health bread is a pleaser.

For this recipe, you need a really large bowl. And space in the refrigerator to fit the really large bowl. We used a 7-liter plastic bowl for this purpose – the kind you wash small laundry in.

You also need:


Wheat bran (vetekli), rye grits or cracked rye (rågkross), wheat flour – preferably the protein-enriched one (vetemjöl special) because it results in fluffier bread, and seeds of your choice like linseed, pumpkin- or sunfloweer seeds, sesame seeds, and fresh yeast.

Here's the complete list of ingredients, with measurements:

13 deciliters cold water
3/4 packet of yeast
1 teaspoon honey
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 deciliter oil
4 deciliters wheat bran (vetekli)
1.5 kilograms (about 2.5 liters) flour
2 deciliters rye grits (rågkross)
1 deciliter pumpkin- or sunflower seeds
1 deciliter sesame seeds
1 deciliter linseed
some coffee for brushing them with

Directions:

1. Start by measuring 13 deciliters of cold water into the bowl. Dissolve the yeast in it, add the honey, oil and salt.

2. Pour down the flour, wheat bran, rye grits plus all the seeds. You can mix the dough with a machine, but we don't have one so I had to rely on my bicep strength and a sturdy spatula. The dough's consistency should be loose. It's not going to be a solid clay-like mass as in other breads, but on the contrary should retain a gooey consistency.

3. Cover the bowl with cloth and let it yeast on the lower part of the refrigerator overnight. By the next morning, the dough had taken up all of the bowl's 7-liter space.


4. On a floured surface, shape the dough into a strip and divide it into 16 buns the size of teacups. Place them on 2 or 3 oven pans lined with wax paper. The dough will still be a bit gooey, but easier to handle.

5. Cover the buns and let rise again for an hour. When almost done rising, preheat the oven to 250 degrees C.

6. After an hour, when the buns are big and the oven is warm, bake the buns in the middle of the oven for 15 minutes, one oven pan at a time. When you take them out of the oven, brush the surface of the buns with coffee.



Your kitchen will smell like a bakery. Wonderful! What's more wonderful is you can freeze them and pop them a few seconds in the microwave when you need "freshly baked" bread one day.

I think one of the buns will be a quick office lunch next Friday after exercise, with ham, tomatoes, bellpeppers, onions and cheese.

See Tags: Food

Let the monsters in

Let me share what makes me smile when I open the door to the new apartment – aside from the fact of going in the new apartment, of course.

In giving Christmas gifts in Sweden, it's a tradition to make up a rhyme or riddle so that the receiver can guess what it is you're giving. We wrote one up when I got my sister Liz a Star Wars cookbook in 2007. She adopted the tradition when she mailed us a mysterious gift over mail:

It's something for your brand new place
Gargoyles which need no more space
Than a pocket, a hand, or otherwise
Owing to their tiny size
Miniscule but never cruel
Though frightful they may seem to be
They'll guard your home most happily
We hope this prezzie brings you smiles,
From Liz and Rob, across the miles

I didn't get a thing at first; I thought it might be some kind of ornamental thing you hang on the door. When we opened the present, it made perfect sense. The rhyme was written on a key-shaped stationery after all!


They're called "Freakeys". They fit on almost any shape of key so you can easily identify one key from another. They come in a pack of 6 little monsters, and their arms jiggle when you shake them.

The purple monster holds Marcus' key. It looks kind of like a purple ape. A purple ape on hair-growth tonic that had just found a bunch of bananas.

Here's what I have on my office key:


He doesn't look too happy that he's about to be in use again starting Wednesday. I'm not ecstatic over that either, but it does make me proud to earn a decent living doing something I think I may be good at. Back to Mr. Office Key, stress is visible in his eyes, anxiety is painted all over this face and his arms are perpetually frozen to I'm-typing-an-essay-mode. It's the look of having drunk too much coffee. Come to think of it, he might have been a good choice of Freakey to remind me of all my deadlines.

And then, after a full day at work, I will get to use my home key, which looks like this:


"Hooray, hooray! I'm home after a day of work! Yeeeeee!" Maybe that's why I got attracted to this one; I imagine that we relate to each other really well.

In the meantime, you can see that Mr. Office Key is resting on his face, the whole back of his head wrinkled from too much thinking about dissertation plans and 15-page essays... which is what I should start thinking about myself. I realize that the Swedish word for the day – which is all over this post by now – is söndagsångest. It means Sunday dread in the face of a working day. But it will pass, and Mr. Home Key will be there jubilating with me.

Thank you Liz and Rob – the monsters are waving their jiggly arms at you!

The crib

Our new year countdown was spent on the balcony of our new apartment, beholding the city below and the fireworks which you see in the above picture.

The apartment is shaping up. We're actually done with most of the interior decorating. A week ago, the living room looked like this:


The look is pretty much unchanged until now, except that out in the hallway, there isn't a ladder anymore. It pretty much resembles my Photoshopped dream below. (Can any of you spot the cats in the two pictures, by the way?)


The kitchen also looks so much different from before. We opened up a shelf to make the counters look less monotonous, got a modern-looking lamp, a nice oak table and four old-fashioned chairs that look good but don't match. Two of the chairs (the ones nearest the wall) are bright red. I like them that way.


On the boring wall there at the back of the dining table, we have this poster that my brother gave Marcus in 2006, when we visited the Philippines. Something that reminds me of home, but still distinctly Swedish. Or is it more distinctly Filipino? After all, the vodka bottle-shape at the hood of the jeepney is pretty hard to distinguish!

The plan is to save up some money to get to Manila by the end of this year, for Christmas 2009 (the traffic is probably going to be terrible!). It's the first day of the year – I have more than enough time to scrimp!