On wednesday David and I went for a walk into town. It felt like it was ages ago that I brought my camera with me for a day like this so it was about time, right?

We walked through the cemetery Stampen, as we almost always do. It's nice to see the changes of the season. This might be the most sad look of the year; lots of branches on the ground and just a gloomy feel all over. I did get this dramatic photo though.

Hello hello!
It smelled like spring outside and I wore a lighter coat, one of my favourite vintage finds (Yeah, yeah, all my coats are "favourite vintage finds", I know... I can't help that Im so good at finding them!).

Close up of chapped lips and a stray white eyebrow blowing in the wind.
Or, you know, just a photo of my face.

Mossy sign.
Moss and copper are the most beautiful textures in the world, in my opinion.

View from Drottningbron (Queen's bridge). You see the mountain in the back? We live below that and a little bit to the left.

Then we arrived at our goal for the day! The coffee place at Antikhallarna! Their Cardemom cake is simply amazing.

Nom nom.

Beautiful, beardy husband. I love his beard so much! David is scared I might have developed a beard fetish or something. Ha! Maybe?

Hello again from behind the coffee cup.
By the way, I'm a very picky cup person. I prefer some cups before others and I absolutely think the taste is different when I drink from a "bad" cup. This one though: Perfection.
Round, soft shapes, nice glace and good size.
So now you know.

I had brought with me a tin box...

... with my Strangers!
Antikhallarna is the perfect place to find new strangers and I actually did find five new photographs with beautiful and/or weird strangers on them. I might show you soon.

On our way home. We were cold and tired and took the tram. The light in the cart was beautiful and I couldn't resist taking photos.

Sneaky photo of David's phone screen... Sadly he's not reading anything interesting.

David is tired and needs to hold his eyes open to stay awake. Or he's trying to scare me. Who knows, really?

We went to the grocery store and I found the most beautiful pomegranate ever. Look at that deep red colour!

At home again. Just admiring that pomegranate for a while.

Jewelry making thingies.

I had a big jewelry order to get done so I placed myself in the sofa and started working with lot's of tea and something very interesting on teve by the looks of it. I think I was watching Late late show with Craig Ferguson (because I love him!) and it's a good show to watch at the same time as making jewelry. The worst ones to watch while jewelry making is detective shows or thrillers. It's just so hard to follow along in all the twists and turns in the plot when I also need to focus on the twists and turns of the copper wire in my hands!

Apparently it was funny...

Not a very good posture maybe but this is how I'm working most of the time. Until my legs fall asleep.

And that's all that happened that day!

Yesterday I sorted through and cleared out clothes that I don't use anymore and today I went to the charity shop Ungdomshjälpen (Youth aid) close to where I live and gave them a huge bag of clothes. It feels so good because it's been a long time coming.
I was in a spring cleaning fever yesterday and even emptied the kitchen cupboards of old food (some with the expiration date way back in 2010!). Why is there a word for cleaning when spring is arriving and WHY do I get the urge to do just that!? I feel like I've fallen for some sort of spring cleaning trap.
Kind of a good trap, though, so maybe I shouldn't complain...

Hope you're having a fantastic weeekend.

Tjingeling!
/Lotta

I have fallen in love with the self timer app TimerCam. It's nothing fancy, no extra gadgets and unnecessary stuff, just a camera with a timer. But it's so fun!
I like taking photos of my every day life and the environment I'm surrounded by, and sometimes a photo of a room misses a person in it and I am always there with me, you know, so why not use myself as a prop?
This also fuels the theatre thirsting side of my personality, because taking a photo with me acting as "Person" sort of gives life to a little scene.
These are a few of my self portraits from the last couple of weeks. Some of them you've seen in earlier posts but I decided they could tag along for this one too.

Well hello there, can I help you with anything? My skills include "How to turn your work space into a complete mess" and "How to stare into you computer for hours while drinking tea". Oh, and "How to take self portraits to make it look like you are a super busy business person".

And here you can see what it looks like when I, for the 54th time that day, had to release the carpet from the evil office chair wheels. I really need to do something about that. Some other time.

Trying different angles, and all that.

At the first production meeting of the year with Teater Esther! Hugging my friend Hanna super hard because it was ages since I saw her last time.

Being embarrassed.
This is a take on the photo from my previous post.
I usually take at least three different photos to make sure I get what I wanted.

Being very tired and trying to turn that into a cool look...

Looking at cute/or funny animal GIFs with my husband. This is something we do often when I come home late from work and we're too tired to watch something with a plot.
Cute animal GIFs are the cure for everything.

Finding that the kitchen cabinet is a good spot to place the phone for some photos.
Here I wanted a picture showing my necklace pendant, but that didn't work too good so I'm still in search of a place for that.

At work one evening waiting for David to come pick me up.

I'm seriously in love with the light in this photo! I like that you can't see a thing through the window, it's just so bright and warm and crisp!
Oh, and a friend of mine pointed out that it looks like I'm standing lurking with a baseball bat in my hand, ready to hit someone on the outside.
It totally does!

At my work (at a group home) we have 24 hour shifts a few times a month.
It's a quite surreal feeling to prepare for bed in the middle of the night in a place where you work and where the bathroom looks a little bit like a hospital with desinfectants and papper rolls all over the place. It feels sort of like I'm in another persons home all alone, hiding from something.

One evening I took this and I just got this feeling like it was taken by some arty farty photograper who takes photos of herself in bad lighting, with a bored posture, gloomy eyes standing in a well thought out, ordinary surrounding with items that scream "I'm a normal person, just like everybody else". (Whoa! Maybe that IS me?)
So I call this one "Bored sailor girl in mint green kitchen with unpaid bills on the table and a loaf of bread on the counter"

And this is from today.
"Bored sailor girl in mint green kitchen waiting for the banana bread to be ready and her friend to arrive".
I feel like a new series have been born. Bored sailor girl is probably going to come back.

So here's a really embarrasing (but also a little bit cool) story straight out of my life.
On saturday I took out my hulahoop from it's place behind the bedroom door and decided it was time I got back too hooping every morning like I used to do a few years ago.

Back then I had started slowly, hooping maybe five minutes straight before I dropped the hulahoop. After months of doing this every morning I was up to 14 minutes without dropping the hoop and I was very proud of myself. It was good workout and I liked to see the progress every day, even though it was only a couple of seconds more each time.
For some reason I stopped doing it for a few years and every time I have tried since then I haven't been able to hoop for more than a couple of minutes and I haven't had any motivation to do it every morning so I just forgot about it, kept the hulahoop behind the bedroom door to collect dust.

Until saturday.
I started to hoop and I just couldn't stop.
I was so fascinated with how long I could keep the hoop spinning and I thought to myself "this is so cool, I'm breaking my own record here!" So I kept going until I was so tired I almost fell to the floor. I let the hoop fall instead and checked the stopwatch.

19 minutes, my friends. NINETEEN!
I was so proud of myself! And a bit amazed, because how was it even possible? Then I realised that I probably have enhanced my endurance through runnning, an activity that I didn't do back then when I was hooping regularly.

Okay, so that's the really cool part. Now comes the embarrasing side of this story.

On sunday I woke up with an extreme muscle soreness. Like never before experienced by my body. I could hardly move. It was HORRIBLE.

But yesterday was even worse.

It hurt to move. It hurt to speak. It definitely hurt to laugh.
It felt like somebody had broken me in two halves and then stuck me back together in a not so orderly fashion, leaving out at least a few of my ribs in the process.
I stayed in the sofa all day yesterday, whining to myself (and to David) about how stupid I was to break my record on the very first day hulahooping again after so many years.
Why didn't I just stop?
Why didn't I take it slow in the beginning?
Well, duh, because I was amazed by my own awesomeness, of course!

For those of you who haven't tried hulahooping you might not realise how hard workout it is for your back and stomach, so I know how ridiculous this sounds. And since I woke up today with a more regular muscle soreness I too am laughing at the silliness of it all.
But I'm also quite proud of myself.

Nineteen minutes! I mean, NINETEEN MINUTES!
Next time I'll stop after ten. I think.

Tjingeling!
/Lotta

Hello!
Oh, my! I am overwhelmed by all the lovely comments and feedback I've received after my last post How to be brave. Facebook, instagram, twitter and this blog have been filled with love these past two days and I am incredibly thankful that you read and liked a text that was very hard for me to write.
I didn't write it to get compliments, I just had to put my thoughts into words to try to explain why something that might seem small to others is a huge deal for me. I haven't written about the things I'm scared of before so maybe it seems like I'm on top of everything, being very confident and corageous. Everybody have things they are scared of, and I think it is important to remember that something you find easy could be really difficult for somebody else, and vice versa.
And sometimes it isn't as simple as "to just get it done already" because there might be trolls and mountains and oceans between your mind and that goal and that is not something you do in a day.
Trolls are evil, you know. Even the ones in your own head.
Enough about that now.
Let's move on to less emotional and more excursion-y things.

When it was David's birthday last week we went on a little photo adventure to "Brösarps backar", the hills of the little village Brösarp. It's a very touristy place during the summer but we thought it might be a bit different during wintertime.
It was a cold day and I had to pause just outside our door to snap some photos of ice on the clematis.

As we expected we were the only ones there.

The birthday boy was cold. It was freeeeeziiiing and the wind was showing no mercy to our faces.

Snowy white fields and blue trees.

The view looking back the way we came. We had a special goal in sight.

The stile where David photographed me way back in 2009!
It was so windy it was difficult to stand on top of it without blowing away.

Yeah. Look at that. That is the face of pain induced by freezing wind.

Laughing through the pain, trying to stand still, trying an elegant pose. I'll let you be the judge of wether I succeeded or not.

It might be more picturesque without me in the photo...

We tracked our own footsteps back to the car.

When we returned to the house I made cardemom buns and when they were ready we cozied up under a blanket to watch a movie and eat our weight in baked goods. But before that I took some photos of my gorgeous husband.

And that was that freezing cold day!

Thanks again for all your kind words regarding my text and I hope you will have a wonderful weekend!

Tjingeling!
/Lotta