What a gloomy day it has been today. Skies the colour of battleships but at least it remained dry and the wind had dropped. What adds to the gloom at the moment is that I'm having trouble sleeping. I often have an insomnia problem at this time of the year and other friends here also report similar problems. Part of it is simply that, by nature, I am a bit of a night owl. I prefer working late at night when the world is quiet and everyone else is asleep. Part of it is related to the lack of light in January playing havoc with my body clock. It seems that my body is convinced that it requires 14 hours of sleep a day, so I already feel tired early in the dark evenings, without waking up at 2 a.m. and tossing and turning until the alarm goes off. There’s nothing more annoying than waking up in the middle of the sleep cycle and not being able to get back to sleep. This has happened every night this week and by today, I feel like the living dead. When I get into insomnia mode, it can be very hard to kick, so I'm going to try cranking up the light bath again when I get home in the afternoons to see if it helps.

While I'm awake, I hear every noise and this includes the constant dripping from the melting snow and the big chunks of snow and ice that fall off the roof and crash to the ground right outside my bedroom window. The temperatures have hovered around zero or just above, so the snow on the roof is thawing and sliding free. This week there have been teams of men up on the buildings in town manually clearing the snow.



As you can see, it's dangerous work being perched up high on a steep, slippery surface in the freezing cold. I have nothing but admiration for the guys who go around doing this job. When I first came here, I wondered why they bothered. My thought was that you could wait for the snow to come down by itself. Of course, I was thinking that snow is always this soft, fluffy, powdery stuff that would float to the ground like a shower of fairy floss. How was I supposed to know that it hardened into ice chunks - there wasn't any snow where I came from! Indeed, a year or so after I came here a teenage boy was killed on the way home from school when a huge chunk of ice slid off a building and on to his head. So roof cleaning is taken very seriously.

The snow continues to disappear, leaving hardened patches of ice in its wake. What a pity the dirty, ugly ice doesn't disappear as fast as the snow. It makes walking around a bit of a challenge, though I never leave home without spikes on my shoes. I have no desire to find myself on the long list of people with broken bones in Sweden at the moment. I'm always a little surprised that they aren't more careful. Many of the victims are women around my own age or older. They have lived here all of their lives, so they must know what can happen. I slipped on ice ONCE and that was once too often. Never again.

I saw a story in the paper about a stolen pink poodle in Stockholm and read on, hoping that someone here actually owned a poodle that was dyed pink. Only to find that it was this poodle they were referring to:



It is a fibreglass rubbish bin found in the courtyard of Stockholms Stadsmuseum in Slussen. It turned up in the train's lost property section and as there is an underground station nearby, one presumes that it was taken as a prank and enjoyed a little joy ride on the Stockholm public transport system. I know it couldn't have been a real pink poodle, but I was still hoping it was so I could wave the article in front of Lars-Göran, who has been giving me heaps about the weird and wonderful things he finds in the news about Australians.

And speaking of Australians, I got this through my subscription to Crikey:



Talk about a VERY unfortunate case of ad placement on a website. It's not the first time I've seen something like this, but never at the Sydney Morning Herald site. I am often amused by the ads that appear say when you are looking up something about annoying SPAM mail - sometimes you get ads to recipe sites for that awful tinned meat with the same name. Do people really eat that stuff? I always thought it was just a Monty Python joke.

Yesterday it was officially the end of Christmas in Sweden - Tjugondedag Knut and the day of julgransplundring. Roughly translated into English, julgransplundring means “plundering of the Christmas tree”. These so-called plunderings are held all across Sweden on January 13th, or, if that falls on a weekday, on the third weekend after Christmas, which is today.



These days, a traditional Swedish plundering involves a lot of singing and dancing around the Christmas tree, stripping it of decorations, and lastly literally throwing it outside. Often, especially in the big organised ones like that have in town, there’s also all sorts of games for the children. For us today, it was time to take down all of the lights and the tree. My apartment look very bare without them.

Not that the birds down at the harbour give a damn. They just want my bread!