Monday, July 5, 2010
Sunday
Well, it took, the video that is!!!
I was able to upload it after 20 minutes. This is our trip down to southern Sweden. Victor did the filming and out of twenty minutes of material we condensed it down to this short three minute clip. Its a little better than the first attempt.
We finally figured out how to add music and text into the video, so now it gives it that semi amateur feeling !
Richard
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Sunday
Well I'm trying to upload another video, we will see if it takes or not. For some odd reason it worked fine for the facebook page, you could click on the link there on the right side to view it.
We are now in southern Sweden. We left Osthammar Saturday morning at 9:00 and made good time all the way to just before Lund, Sweden. There they decided to take a bridge apart over the Freeway and close the entire thing down. We were in a line, or maybe a parking lot would be more descriptive of the area, for close to an hour.
We finally made it down to Elena and Siverts house at 6:00 in the evening. Elena is Elsie's sister. It seems like Elsie has hundreds of relatives down here in Skane. They all seem to be constantly dropping by to visit. What I really need is for her to write down the family tree on paper so I can learn who is related to whom.......it seems like it never ends
Back to the video upload that didn't work, I seem to be going crazy with Blogger.....nothing seems to work with them, so tomorrow I need to take some shots of the country side with all the rolling fields of crops and just show you through jepg pictures....its just gorgeous
We dropped off Lina at the Malmo train station today. She has a Danish friend, who's family lived two years in Salt Lake and she wanted to visit them. So through some emails we planned the meeting and they came over by train from Kopenhamn to pick up LIna..........so now my daughter is away for five days !!!
Well such is life!
Looks like I'll just keep struggling to follow the dialect down here, the relatives all find that quite amusing!
Richard Boyer
We are now in southern Sweden. We left Osthammar Saturday morning at 9:00 and made good time all the way to just before Lund, Sweden. There they decided to take a bridge apart over the Freeway and close the entire thing down. We were in a line, or maybe a parking lot would be more descriptive of the area, for close to an hour.
We finally made it down to Elena and Siverts house at 6:00 in the evening. Elena is Elsie's sister. It seems like Elsie has hundreds of relatives down here in Skane. They all seem to be constantly dropping by to visit. What I really need is for her to write down the family tree on paper so I can learn who is related to whom.......it seems like it never ends
Back to the video upload that didn't work, I seem to be going crazy with Blogger.....nothing seems to work with them, so tomorrow I need to take some shots of the country side with all the rolling fields of crops and just show you through jepg pictures....its just gorgeous
We dropped off Lina at the Malmo train station today. She has a Danish friend, who's family lived two years in Salt Lake and she wanted to visit them. So through some emails we planned the meeting and they came over by train from Kopenhamn to pick up LIna..........so now my daughter is away for five days !!!
Well such is life!
Looks like I'll just keep struggling to follow the dialect down here, the relatives all find that quite amusing!
Richard Boyer
Friday, July 2, 2010
Friday
Well wonders do happen. maybe Blogger fixed their problem, but I was able to upload my very amateur film clip. Yes, I know !
I bought a flip video camera before I left so as too show you some "live from Amsterdam footage" Please forgive me, as I'm still in the learning curve. I promise that I will get better with it.......really !
Richard
Friday
Friday,
We had the circus in town yesterday, so Elsie and I took all the kids and cousins to see it. The whole town of Osthammar gathered under the big top to watch “Cirkus Maximum” put on their performance. They set up the night before in a rain storm, had the show and basically started pulling everything back down as the guests were leaving. Now the field is empty, no sign of the circus that moved on to a new location….what a life !!!
I mean the amount of work they put into a two-hour show and then to tear it all down again sound just horrible.
One of their shows did impress me though and I would have loved to find out how the hell they did it, but I know that would be their closest guarded secret. It was a piece they did of woman changing dresses in a split second. A puff of smoke and bang she’s changed out of a green short dress into a long flowing white gown. Now before you all say, “Well, Duh! It’s because she just threw the gown over the short dress.” She also did it the other way around, long dress changing into a short dress in the blink of an eye!!!
I biked around town this afternoon, yesterday it was pouring down rain, so I figured people wouldn’t want to see rainy pictures of the town.
Tomorrow we are driving down to southern Sweden; it’s about a nine-hour drive.
Richard Boyer
Thursday, July 1, 2010
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
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
Monday, June 28, 2010
Monday
Monday
Actually it’s 12:30 at night for us, but the sun is already up here at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. At 8:30 on a Monday morning the place is fairly busy. The flight over was long, long enough to watch three films on the little screens they have on the back of the seat rests. I never could sleep on airplanes, so right about now I could just lay down anywhere on the floor and fall asleep in a few minutes.
Richard Boyer
Sunday
Sunday,
Location: 30,000 feet above Wyoming.
I’m on the way to Sweden with Victor and Lina. We set the alarm for 7:00, ate breakfast and headed out the door for check-in with Delta airlines. I was expecting a zoo of people, but instead it went quite smoothly with their self check-in.
Last night we all drove up to Park City for the Midsummer celebration. A holiday that is wildly popular in the Scandinavian countries, stemming back to the days of the Vikings. They saw it as a time to honor the longest day of the year and the fertility of the human race. Yes many a child has his or her birthday in March.
We had the Maypole from last years festival; a large 4x4 pressure treated wood pole with a cross bar on it. This is then covered in leafy twigs cut off of bushes and then adorn with flowers. String is generally used to wrap the greenery around the pole.
We were also late driving up there, putting the entire pole decorating ceremony on hold. Somehow when we tied the large wooden cross to the top of the car, I thought wearing a white robe would have fit in better. It looked like we were heading to a KKK rally. I was waiting for the first cop to pull us over and start the questioning process.
The women took over the decorating tradition as we arrived. Most of the guys grouped together with some stout beer in hand. David Maribello, our electrician friend had just finished a job wiring up a brewery and of course had a rather large collection of their most potent products in the form of liter bottles. This of course attracted more guys to join our group in conversation, as the women worked. In this organization the majority is Swedish wives married to Americans. We all had something in common, foreign wives.
Soon the dinner bell rang out and we lined up for the smorgasbord of food, starting with herring and potatoes. Most of the guys gleefully fill their plates up with the fish, as the Swedish tradition is to wash it down with Aquavit, a potent 40 percent-spiced vodka. With each shot the group broke into Swedish songs, most of which I would be shot for translating. Especially when they deal with the sexual arousal of women, or the stiffness of certain male parts.
When everyone is to the point of finding it difficult to balance, the games begin. We split up into seven groups and were given names from each day of the week. The completion was fierce, as Monday’s group was yelling out primeval grunts.
The first task was to loop a string around your ear with a piece of candy tied to the end. You then had to run up to an empty wine bottle and gingerly try to lower the piece, in this case, a Swedish fish into the neck of the bottle. No hand could be used and it took a while. A three-legged race followed with half of the contestants flailing on the ground. They saved the most dangerous until last. “The boot tossing”. This is where to victim gets into more or less a football squat stance and the boot is then tossed between the legs, arcing it over the back in an attempt to propel it forward. The result usually ends up with the boot flying straight up in the air and landing on some unsuspecting contestant. I deflected one away from Lina head. It was a fun evening for everyone.
At 11;00 we finally headed back down the valley, we had an early morning to deal with.
Richard Boyer
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