Thank God for Monday

A pretty full on two days this weekend, it's a relief to get back to work. It actually started on Friday night when I stupidly suggested on the bus ride home that we hop off early, pick up some horse feed, and then walk the rest of the way home. Saving the hassles of getting the car out of the garage. A brilliant plan, except that I had forgotten that a bag of horse feed weighs about 25kg. Too late for the pride to back out, of course, so it wasn't a fun slog walking 2.5km home with 25kg on one shoulder. I'd like to say that I had learnt my lesson, but that's highly unlikely. Still, I'm sure that the horse appreciates how dumb I can be.

Saturday started out quietly, with a torture work-out session in the gym. It used to be quite simple, I just gave up whenever I had enough. Now that my wife has decided to get in on the act, I have to keep on training for as long as she does. And I have to be all studly and act like it's all perfectly normal. With a bit of luck she'll break a leg and I'll be off the hook again. Later in the afternoon we decided to take a trek up to IKEA. Actually, IKEA was really more of a side vist, the real purpose was to go shopping across the border in Finland. I don't think that I'll ever stop thinking how cool it is to drive across a river and be in another country and in another time zone. It's exceptionally cool when you've grown up in a country where it took 3+ hours just to fly to the nearest neighbouring country. An hour in the car and I'm in another land. That's pretty neat. Anyway, just across the border (literally) is a large shopping mall where we usually go to buy cheap booze, have a meal and, of course, look for new shoes. Apparently you just can't have too many shoes. When we rolled on in it was an hour and a half before closing time and the place was thinning out. Just the way that we anti-socials like it. So we decided to start off with a treat and eat an early dinner. Which we did for about 35 minutes. A bit of a shock when we came out of the restaurant and the entire shopping mall had closed. Remember that other time zone that I spoke about ? Well, we didn't. We were still an hour behind on Swedish time and the shops had closed 5 minutes before we came out. The bastards.

Disappointed as we were, we trundled back across the river to the Swedish side, and into IKEA. As I think I've written before, we've discovered that the trick to shopping at IKEA is to arrive around 5pm or later. Most people have already admitted defeat and have gone home, which was certainly the case when we arrived. Looking at the car park we figure that there must have been maybe 12 or 15 people tops in the store. You could almost multiply that number by 100 during peak hours. It can be madness. Anyway, we ended up spending way more time than we thought in the kichen area, pondering even further about the last of the kitchen cabinets we need. Naturally we didn't end up buying any. That would be way too easy. About then we heard the announcement that the store was closing in 5 minutes, and we were still halfway across town in "IKEA store speak". As we did actually have some items which we needed to buy we had to literally run through the store. I've become very Swedishised when it comes to IKEA and I always stick to following the floor arrows. I have to say that we received excellent customer service along the way. Everytime we stopped there popped up 10 staff members to help us. Actually I suspect it was more like 10 really pissed staff members waiting for us to get the hell out of the store so that they could go home. But anyway, we ripped along, grabbed our stuff, roared through the checkout, out the door and into the car park. That's when it hit us that we were actually the very last customers in IKEA that day. It was a pretty surreal feeling. I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't get the same rush being the first, as there's likely to be other people waiting for the store to open. But being the last to leave, that's pretty cool. Chalk one up for us.

Sunday was the big day. Today was the day we were collecting our horse from his summer grazing and bringing him home to his stables again. I always hold my breath on this one. Loading up a 500kg animal is very much dependant on the will of the 500kg animal. We caught a real break this time, it took maybe 5 minutes before he decided that it was ok to go on-board. It may be that he was just ready to go home after 2 months, or it may have been that he quite liked the different type of horse float that we had borrowed. Ths float definitely had more light and felt more roomy, so that may have been the difference. Either way, it was a huge relief. There was a bit of a downside when he got a "Welcome Home" kick in his back leg from his stable buddy when we got home. Poor boy was rather confused about that, but they soon sorted it out and were quite happy when we left.

Sunday evening was the monthly board meeting for our apartment body corporate. I don't look forward to these very much as they seem to drag on and on without achieving all that much. This meeting I was a little anxious. We live on one of the upper floors and our apartment includes a private balcony. Not massive, only about 10 square metres, but with a lovely evening view facing the lake and sunsets. We have decided that we are going to enclose it with glass but for that we needed the approval of our body corporate board. Of which I'm one of the board members. The problem is that the person we bought our apartment from is also a board member. He moved to another, smaller, apartment in the building. We done a lot of renovating since we moved in, mostly modernising and bringing more in towards our tastes. Personal touches. But, I get the feeling that in doing so we have annoyed the previous owner who has taken our changes to be a bit of a personal insult towards his own tastes (or lack thereof). In the past he's always found a reason as to why he doesn't think that something we are planning is a particularly good idea. It gets a bit tiresome. We love the apartment, it's just a shame that the previous owner didn't move right out of the complex. So I fully expected a bit of conflict fom him over this. When the item came up at the meeting I excused myself from the meeting. Clearly there was quite a bit of debate over the issue (which I thought was pretty straight forward) because it was almost 15 minutes before they called me back. The chairman told me that the board had approved our request, subject to the usual Building Consent conditions, which was great. However, I did note that our former apartment owner never said a word for the rest of the meeting. I guess that the other board members must like us more than they like him. Great news though and we can finally confirm our order with the supplier. The cat will be well pleased to catch the last of the summer rays in comfort.