Following on the success of the last picture essay from Skärhamn, here are more pictures.

When I leave my house and walk down to the harbor – which really just starts a few hundred feet from my house, and stretches for a long, long way all into downtown, this is what I see. This is sort of the north harbor, and the exit to the sea is just through that narrow passage away in the distance. Beyond that is open sea. And this is what is looks like on a sunny day – just sunshine reflecting into the waters.

As I head downtown, I pass by this little houses, like this one. I wonder who lives here. It looks so small and so old, and yet is it very typical for the quaintness of houses around here. Not long ago, I was driving around Stenungsund looking at apartment blocks, and I felt like I would suffocate – who can live in these huge chocolate boxes in the city? Out here, every house is unique, custom built, and just take a few steps and you’re breathing in the air from the open oceans.

Believe it or not, but this is the main street through Skärhamn. It’s a strict 30 km/h road – and tourists often drive slower, even stopping in the road – and along this little street lies everything. Over to the right here is the downtown square with a few banks and stores, and the main harbor starts just beyond the bend in the distance.

This is what you see when you proceed. Among these red and white houses lie little restaurants and other cozy shops. The main harbor lies here – although the guest harbor, which is much bigger, starts just to the right (and perhaps a little further). The scene sort of reminds of the scottish fishing village from the movie “Local Hero”. Sometimes I hear a moped drive by my house and I think “ooh, t’is just Ricky out driving again” (it’s funny if you’ve seen the movie).

The small boat harbor is, of course, the main attraction. Hundreds and hundreds of boats show up every summer, some from Norway, Germany, France, the Netherlands, all over the place. Germans hike up and down the streets, Dutch tourists drive around in RV’s, French families toast with wine on their boats, and Poles walk around the harbor taking pictures.

…and strange and frightening things happen with church here during summer.

The Swedish Coast Guard have a few boats here too, in case of emergencies, difficult weather or similar. Although, I’ve noticed that there is one distinct difference between the U.S. Coast Guard and the Swedish: The American ships usually have a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on the deck.

Funny how coincidences can stack up in your life. If they really are coincidences. For instance, every trip I have taken to the United States since 2001 has been followed by some kind of disaster.

My first trip on this side of the century, in May 2001, was to Florida. It included a journey of over 3000 miles (if I remember correctly) from Florida up to Michigan and back again. One of the first pictures I took of that journey was the picture on the left, depicting an airplane lining up with the World Trade Center skyscrapers in the distance. A very ominous picture, if you ask me. Four months later, two airplanes flew into the skyscrapers over there and caused them to collapse in the worst act of terrorism seen to date.

About a year and a half later, I went to Florida again. My friend Johan and I traveled all over Florida in a rented vehicle, went to Benny Hinn crusades and ate pancakes at IHOP. And, we saw the launch of the United States space shuttle Columbia, as clearly seen on the picture to the right. We stood along the harbor of Titusville and watched as it blasted off into the skies, and then two weeks later, it burned up over Texas upon reentry to earth.

Last summer, I went to Minneapolis to visit relatives and attend a church conference. I arrived in Minneapolis on a Thursday, the week after the Oasis summer conference 2006 in Skövde. Nothing very disastrous happened during that week, with the exception on the day that I left for home again, and the British police just arrested a couple of men in Britain that tried to blow up airplanes using liquids. Fortunately enough, my home trip was routed through Amsterdam instead of London, so we didn’t have to carry our belongings in clear, plastic bags. But there were a lot of security police carrying submachine guns at the airport.

I’m mentioning all this because today, a Thursday, the very week after the Oasis summer conference 2007 in Skövde, I woke up to find that the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi in downtown Minneapolis just collapsed with presumably 9 dead, 60 wounded and 20 missing. I drove over that bridge, oh, just about a year ago.

Maybe I should stay home next year. :)

And once again, it’s the time of the year when temperatures climb – not outside, inside – to 28 degrees.

Swedish houses are built to contain heat and not let it out. Which means that whenever the sun comes out and summer temperatures roll in, all the houses become little saunas. Our office does the same, too.

I’m surprised that no one has learned yet.

JavaScript is one of those gray areas in my life that I tend to stay away from. I’ve fiddled around with it once or twice, but it’s never had much of an appeal to me.

That is, until I found jQuery. And Interface.

I think this is the first time I’ve fallen in love with a JavaScript library. I’ve never gotten tears in my eyes from a demo before, but I did now. I’m sitting here, thinking “oh.. my.. god.. I just HAVE to embed this into ALL MY WEBPAGES, in fact, EVERY WEBPAGE I’VE EVER DONE, RIGHT NOW!”…

It’s like Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Cupid and Fortuna all suddenly lined up together with Ajax and settled nicely into the little operator $, saying “hey, I’m your new best friend, where do you want to go today?”

I brought a cat to work.

Of course it’s not a real cat, it’s a fake one. But it lies so silently and comfortably on my desk that when people pass by and see it, they jump out of surprise to see a cat there. And then they move closer, carefully reaching out and petting it, and then they quickly realize that it’s not alive.

It’s been the talk of the office for days now. Meine kleine Katze.

I jumped out of bed today at 06:18, realizing I had overslept and was in danger of missing my train 06:53. So I jump into the shower, dress in a mad rush and hop on my bike to go down to the train station. As I arrive I realize I must have missed the train by a minute.

However, as I go in there I see an unusual flurry of people. And then I see the firetrucks and the blue flashing lights all over the train station. A police car was parked in the middle section between the tracks and a firehose was laid out across the tracks.

One of the train sets at the station had caught fire and the entire train traffic through Skövde – including the main Stockholm-Gothenburg line – was completely stopped. By the time I’m writing this (08:22) SJ still has no information about when traffic will resume.

These are some pictures I took of the incident.

The train that’s burning is the one standing on track 3, that is behind the white Vättertåget train. No flames were visible, but there was an awful lot of smoke, as can readily be seen.

“And that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”