Thursday

Thursday,

I feel like I am isolated on an island. I’ve been trying for the last few days to do an entry on the blog site, but have been hitting brick walls every time. We arrived all save and sound at Mormor,s house. That’s what the kids call Karin’s mother, the Swedish word for Grandmother on your mother’s side of the family. Olov, Karin’s brother picked us up at the airport. I tried to stay keep my eyes open as he drove us the hour and a half back through small winding roads to Osthammar. He wanted to try out another route than the norm and it was actually quite beautiful. I just wish I were more coherent to enjoy it. Both Victor and Lina were fast asleep in the back. We had all been awake for over 24 hours. We arrived to a jubilant Grandmother, glad to see her grand children again.

Elsie is 80, so the concept of Internet access is a little foreign to her, although for some odd reason she has no problem Skyping with her brothers and sisters when she is in southern Sweden.

Anyway, back to the story. I bought this flip video camera and thought it would be really cool to shoot some footage of the town she lives in, Osthammar. So I put together a short video clip and went across the street to where Karin’s sister, Marianne lives. They naturally have Wi-Fi, Internet and all the other modern features of living in the 21st century.

I loaded the clip onto the iMovie on the laptop and edited it to the right size and format for Google’s Blogspot and tried to upload it…..what a joke! I spent the next two hours trying to figure out what was wrong. I could get it about halfway loaded and then it would just freeze up and sit there, nothing more would happen. From what I could determine it was a problem at their end. And of course Blogspot is like Facebook, no fucking support of any kind. I still cannot figure out why they don’t have even the slightest tech support for their sites, especially when so many people have complaints about it. Just a simply Internet search on people having problems with Facebook will net you page after page of un-answered complaints.

I finally gave up and decided to try it again the next day, figuring that maybe, just maybe they would fix the problem and make it so that a simpleton could upload a small video clip, after all they do have the icon there for a reason!

The next day I was foiled again. Blogspot did the same thing again, it would load up about halfway and then just freeze up. Then Marianne’s WiFi stopped working. No access to the outside world. She had no idea what the problem was and neither did I. We did have a lightning storm later on that evening, but that still wouldn’t explain why it wasn’t working earlier.

Today my only option is to head to the local library in town and try it there, they have Internet access. Hopefully their system is up and running.

On Saturday we are driving down to southern Sweden, all the way down to Skana at the very tip. It’s about a nine-hour drive. This is Elsie’s home turf, where all her relatives are. There the land is rich for farmers, hills covered with crops as far as you can see and of course some of her relations have rather large tracts of land for farming. If we are lucky maybe we will see some covered in the bright yellow flower of Raps. It can be a spectacular sight against the blue sky. The beaches down there along the southern coast are where I get most of my subject matter. I have done many a painting with the rolling sand dunes of the southern coastline.

Richard Boyer