Dag 411: min svenskt har inte blivit bättre

Its now about a year since my last Swedish lesson and every day in every way I feel I am forgetting more and more. If anybody out there wants to write to me in (simple) Swedish it would be most welcome and I will reply to the best of my current ability - which isn't saying much. That way I may be able to start crawling back up the slope of Swedish knowledge that I am steadily sliding down. Maybe I should try doing my next post entirely in Swedish.

Next month I will be visiting Sweden again and (as always) this time I want to try and get by using as little english as possible.

Once upon a time my posts seemed to revolve around a single theme or story and often contained a number of in jokes that no one other than me would even notice were there, but lately my posts seem to be more of a list of disparate statements.

Here comes my latest list of disparate statements:

Last weekend I collected my new Smart car. It is red and silver and I very much enjoyed driving it from Yorkshire up to Edinburgh last monday. I have fitted my Blaupunkt Stockholm cd player that I bought about a year ago, but never got around to fitting in my old Volvo. I have also installed an ICE iPod thingy that allows me to listen to my iPod in the car, but as the cd player is such an old model it doesn't fully integrate so I don't get the title of the current track being displayed on the blaupunkt display. Next I will be getting some better speakers.

About 12 years ago I had a fairly basic home recording studio setup and used to spend most of my time writing and recording songs. Ocassionaly I would add some singing to the songs, but only when the house was empty and I would never let anybody hear the songs with me singing on apart from the fact that I once sent a tape with 4 of my songs with singing to a magazine called Home and Studio recording. The tape was eventually reviewed and I was pretty pleased with what was said, although it wasn't exactly a glowing review. The last pieces of music I recorded was about 8 years ago and I still have a copy of those last two (instrumental) tracks on my iPod, but most of my recorded output is currently lost. Recently I have been regrettingb the fatc that I haven't played any music for such a long time so when I drove my Smart car up last Monday I brought my old Korg Prophesy with me and this week I ordered enough stuff to be able to start some simple recording onto my apple powerbook. If it goes ok I will bring a few more bits of kit up here and expand my setup. Things have moved on alot since I was last doing this sort of stuff. I can remember when Yamaha brought out the first sub £10,000 cd recorder and recording to hard disk was unheard of back then. I'll let you know how it goes.

Yesterday Evening on my way home from work I spent one hour in HMV trying to decide how to spend some of the money I got from selling my old Volvo, which I no longer needed because I had bought a Smart car. I picked up various DVDs and CDs, but kept putting them back. I had a wallet full of money and could have bought a whole stash of stuff, but I kept thinking if I spent all the money then I wouldn't have any left. In the end I bought the new cd by Tori Amos and the Smiley's People DVD, and thats all. I could have spent about 5 times as much as I did, but for some reason I didn't. The other ground breaking think that happened in that HMV shop was that I bought the first non scandinavian cd I had bought for a very long time (at least 2 years).