Happy Birthday Malcolm!

An eventful and fantastic year it was for you , Mille! Getting married, buying a big house in Washington DC and becoming a father! We all wish you a happy birthday back here in Sweden with a loud
HIP HIP HURRAY (so you can almost hear it across the Atlantic!!) and wish you a matching year to come!
Kisses and love from Mum

Sunday at the auctions..

Sunday, we spent a good many hours at the auctions in Tofta at Gotland. Financial recession, still winter and no tourists yet on the island in combination with "beginning-of-the-month" not so very full purses, made a few bids quite astonishing bargains! Here is Ulf, the great conductor of the show in action. My sister happily landed the bid on the lovely Gustavian mirror in the background.

An old "nostalgia" radio with bakelite fittings is changing owner at a fair price..

These are some of the items I landed: the small "Emma" easychair at 20 dollars, the beautiful carved chair with hand embroidered seat for 45 dollars and a field easel for summer´s outdoor painting activties for 6 dollars.
Like this maybe: Wilson Irvine painting en plein air with portable easel

Ulf with assistants auctioning off an old wooden chair..

Anticipating auction feet ..

Old copper..and 100 years of fine dust..

Brique-á-braque and a lovely old turn-of-the century straw hat..

Bambi keeps an watchful eye on his items in the box..

I really freaked out over those two lion´s hilarious smiles..

A pretty stuffed fox gazes out through the window and yearning for the freedom of the woods..
"Who will be my new owner?
What will I do? Where will I go?"

The crash..How much can a brave man take?

Prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai of Zimbabwe was headed to a weekend rally in his home region when the accident occurred. State television said the truck swerved on an uneven and notoriously dangerous single-lane stretch of road on the outskirts of the capital, Harare. Tsvangirai's spokesman said the car carrying the prime minister, his wife, driver and bodyguard had sideswiped the truck and rolled at least three times.

Susan Tsvangirai, 50, was pronounced dead soon after arrival at a clinic about 25 miles
(40 kilometers) from Harare. They have six children together and had been married for 30 years.

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai left the hospital bandaged and mourning his wife Saturday after a car crash that his supporters blamed partly on insufficient security provided by President Robert Mugabe. Friday's crash nonetheless "could have been avoided" if Tsvangirai had the kind of motorcade that usually travels with Mugabe. Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change called for an investigation into the collision with a truck carrying U.S. aid, but cautioned against concluding that it was the latest assassination attempt against the longtime opposition leader.
"We cannot talk of foul play ... until it has been proved what has really transpired," said Tendai Biti, the country's new finance minister and Tsvangirai's No. 2 in the party. He did not say whether his party had requested a larger convoy for Tsvangirai at any time before the crash..
Mugabe sent the prime minister's family a message that called Susan Tsvangirai's death a "tragedy that has fallen on our nation at a time of great hope for our country," state radio reported.
"Great hope for our country"? I think to myself.
."This hypocrite even uses this tragic catastrophy to promote himself and his so called efforts to improve the situation of the disaster he´s caused this poor country over the years of his rule. Even if there has been foul play involved in the accident - how big are the chances that this will be exposed and tried in today´s Mugabeland?"

(Photos/parts of text: AP/Washington Post)

Jitterbug cookies!

Close by my old school downtown Stockholm is an old café called Kjellsons. It was here we met a long time ago at the lunch breaks on days when the school food of the day was more awful than usual. At Kjellsons in those days we could have a smoke, a cup of coffee and - when in good financial dispositions - we ordered a "Jitterbug cookie"! This little treat was made of a lovely combination of puffpaste and meringue. Mmmmm. Whenever I find it in some small family run bakery today - which is rarely - I go berserk! Today i manaed to find theJitterbug recipe - in Swedish - and will have a go at it.
This (below) is the only picture I could find of the legendary "Kjellsons Café" which opened in the 1920´s and is now transformed into a resturant. Kjellsons was the natural meeting place in Stockholm in the 50´sand 60´s and the expression
" See you at Kjellsons" was well known to the Stockholm schoolkids. A home away from home! It was a true forerunner for the Café Culture existing massively in the capital today.
I sometimes go there for nostalgic reasons and have a bite in the resturant. "God god!" I think to myself. "If those walls could talk.." And when I ask for jitterbugs there are none anymore. I will have to make some at home with a cup of coffee and travel down memory lane once more to the sweet days of youth and eternal sunshine when a "latte" was a totally unknown concept and a jitterbug was not!

Thank you Paivi for the bun-and-cookie inspiration. Read about her school café and favourite creamy bun here.
Here is the Jitterbug recipe in Swedish for the Swedish blog readers
(apologize for nor having translated - time was too short today):
Jitterbugg
ca 40 st
Ugn först 200° sedan 175°
5 dl vetemjöl
200 g margarin
1 dl strösocker
2 tsk vaniljsocker
Maräng:
2 äggvitor
½ dl strösocker
Mät upp mjöl och socker och hacka snabbt ihop (använd gärna matberedare) till en slät deg, med smöret skuret i tärningar.
Dela i två delar och lägg kallt en stund.
Vispa vitorna till mycket hårt skum i absolut ren skål. Tillsätt sockret och vispa i några minuter till.
Kavla ut degen mellan bakplåtspapper till 20x30 cm och lyft bort översta pappret.
Bred marängen över och rulla ihop från långsidorna, vira pappret om och lägg kallt 30 minuter (eller i frysen 10-15 minuter).
Skär varje längd i 20 bitar och ställ på plåt med bakplåtspapper.
Grädda strax under mitten, på 200° i 5 minuter, sänk sedan värmen till 175° och grädda ytterligare 9-10 minuter tills kakorna fått fin färg.

The budding branches..

..picked off my apple trees a week ago and put indoors in the warmth of the house, unfolded some of their pretty flowers today - a premonition of what´s to come..

I put them in an old oats jar nexr to the lovely tulips in a similar coffee jar in the window. On the other side of the window, the garden is making itself ready for spring. The snow is melting away and there are quite a few white and yellow flowers popping up in the flower beds below..

The days are getting longer and we now have daylight until about 6 o´clock. I unpacked some of my old books today and enjoyed their beauty. The ones above on top are from around 1790. Now I just have to set out for the country auctions and make good bids for some antique book shelves to put them in. In style..

Humor and small scale "political problems"..

WASHINGTON—Eighteen senators were sent home from Congress Tuesday after a routine screening found an infestation of nits, larvae, and adult parasites living on the scalps of high-ranking Washington lawmakers.

Have you too found :"The Onion - America´s Finest News Source?"

Well, if you still haven´t and feel slightly outdated and a bit low-keyed for the moment - why don´t you try the link above? There is always help for a number of petty problems as shown above..

Hyra på Sandhamn..

Och så var vi då äntligen inne i mars månad! Skööönt! Det känns som det värsta är över. Vi år med raska steg mot våren! Och sommaren! Sol, glitter på vattnet, fräkniga näsor, lägga nät..segling och bad, hängmattan, fester i det fria, långa lata dagar med kompisarna på trouvillestränderna, After Sail, Värdshuset, Klubben, Dykarn.
Nu är alltså tiden inne då förfrågningar om uthyrning av mina hus på Sandhamn i Stockholms skärgård börjar droppa in!

Min bokningslista plockas fram och kalendern prickas av undan för undan som bokningar görs och när anmälningsavgiften är betald. Det första som "ryker" brukar ju vara Gotland Runtveckan då det inte finns en sängplats att uppbringa på ön! Intresserad av att hyra? Vill du ha vidare upplysningar och fråga om något?
Jag kan kontaktas bäst på mailadressen: piaehrenpreis@hotmail.com. Märk mailet med "Hyra på Sandhamn."

Today´s global message:

Due to the financial recession, the light at the end of the tunnel will consequently be turned off..

Today, it left me..

..the antique wood stove that has been sitting in the kitchen of the old house ever since 1909.
It was too old to run and I needed the space in the kitchen. I can tell you it was heavy to move through the house and on to the terrace door where it was fork truck lifted by Mats - my ever so helpful brother-in-law. The fundament where ithe EBE-stove had been sitting for such along time was unspeakable. At first I figured the stove had been placed on an insulated carpet of some kind until I discovered the layers of decades of fine compact dust that could be picked up in one full piece..like a carpet..
I hurt my heart to see it go after such a long time of serving the family members that used to live here. I had of course checked with a few antique dealers in Gotland before making the decision and it turned out that there is no market for these sturdy pieces any more - at least not in my part of the world..

Vouge 1893-1963

In the 80´s, I lived in Harare, Zimbabwe. Many people had just fled the country after Mugabe seized power in the in Rhodesia and renamed "his" country Zimbabwe ( the house of stone) and they left in a hurry and left a lot of their things behind. Among them: heaps of valuable books,to heavy to carry along on this journey into the unknown future..
In Borrowdale shopping centre in the northern part of town, however, there was an old white haired lady - a "Rhodesian" as white people were then called, too old to go and who stayed on in the new Zimbabwe. She was a total book freak and was running a secondhand bookstore with plenty of old and valuable hardbacks - a true Aladin´s cave for a book worm like me. In her dark and book covered store ( where one hardly could make her out among the tall stacks of books) I found this marvellous book: Vouge 1893-1963, an anthology on seventy years of bound volumes of Vouge in which the photographs by the world´s most famous and successful photographers are represented. I present you below with a few (haphazardly chosen )of these pictures from this heavy volume that I really treasure. They all represent a spicy time color and spirit of their era - each and every one..And..They simply have to be shared!.