Hej hej!

Today I wanted to show you something that's been taking up a lot of my time lately. As you probably know I'm part of a theatre group called Teater Esther. We were formed two years ago and gave our first play, Människor i solen, last october.
Now it's time for our second play. This year we have been rehearsing a play called SÃ¥rskorpor (Translates to Scabs, as in healing wounds) written by the playwright Maria Blom. It's a fun, sad, music filled, weird show about friendship where all the actors play more than one role each.
The opening night is october 17 so only one month to go now!
I will definitely tell you more about this later but for now you will have to make do with a picture of me as Doris and Agneta, the two ladies I will be playing.

And here's some info in swedish for people who wants to come and see us!

Teater Esther ger SÃ¥rskorpor av Maria Blom.

Spelas:
17 oktober kl 19

19 oktober kl 17

20 oktober kl 17

Biljettpris: 100:-

Adress: Fängelsets kulturhus, Kålltorpsgatan 3, Göteborg (närmsta spårvagnshållplats Stockholmsgatan, linje 1 eller 3)

Boka genom att maila till: teateresther@gmail.com

Ange vilket datum du vill gå och hur många biljetter du vill ha. Biljetterna betalas på plats.

KOMSI KOMSI! Jag lovar att det blir en toppenföreställning!

I told you about the cape. It is one fabulous piece of clothing. A vintage nurse cape from 1976 that makes me feel part super hero, part Red Ridinghood.
When David and I bought our new camera we went to the beach to get to know it better. I thought it was a great moment to bring my cape and turn into my super hero persona for the evening.

My Super Hero name? Photo Girl!

David is fuzzy, but SMILING! I could NOT leave this in the folder all left out and forgotten.

Photo Girl takes pictures of rescue equipment. Not really sure what help that might do to anybody but, yeah!

Photo Girl leaves no angles unphotographed.

David shows off his impressive "Kasta macka"-technique
(Translates to "Throw sandwich" in swedish. WHAT do you call it in english?)

Photo girl took some pictures of feathers and then the adventure was over for the evening and she went home to drink some tea.

Tjingeling!
/Lotta

In july David and I made a weekend trip to Copenhagen. Our plan was to buy lots of alcohol for our wedding but we wanted to have a few nice days there as well. I blogged a little bit about that in a post with iPhone photos but since I took so many photos with my Nikon D80 I wanted to show you those too. So lets take a look at a very nice weekend in july, when the sun was super hot and David's and my wedding was still in the future.

Last night I had a terrible, terrible nightmare. It was the worst one I've ever had, I think, and I woke up and cried hysterically for over ten minutes. I kept falling back into the dream every time I fell asleep again so I stayed awake most of the night to get away from it. Truly awful. Today I have been feeling such sorrow and grief all day. My brain still hasn't really realised it was only a dream. I find dreams to be so very interesting and I am fascinated how much they can control us even when we are awake and know the difference between dream and reality.
I find it easier if I talk about it and sort of keep reminding my brain that it wasn't real.
I always have very vivid dreams but luckily most of them are just weird and/or funny.
Lets hope tonight will be an especially lovely one.
Oh, and sweet, joyful dreams to all of you!
/Lotta

Hi everybody!
One very windy day last week David and I walked up the hill to the place where we got married (almost two weeks ago now). We wanted to take some photos of our wedding pocket watches. We bought ourselves a new camera the day before because our old Nikon D80 had been falling apart for quite some time and the day before the wedding it just broke. Since we have been wanting a new one for a while we took that as a sign and went and bought the Nikon D7000 that we'd been drooling over for quite some time.
I have been taking less and less photos with the old camera because it wasn't working as good anymore and that just took all the fun out of it. But now! Oh my, now I'm all back to taking lots and lots of photos again. This is one lovely camera. We are still learning but I think you already can see an improvement in crispness and clarity.
Well, enough talking about the camera: Let's start on the pocket watches instead!

As many of you probably know already David and I chose to have engagement rings in wood, made by the lovely people at Stout Woodworks. In Sweden it's custom for both the man and woman to get an engagement ring. At the wedding only the woman gets a new ring that she will engrave and the man will engrave his engagement ring. Since we weren't able to engrave our wooden rings and I didn't really want another ring we thought we could do something different as a sort of memory to keep and have engraved.
A pocket watch is beautiful, perfect to engrave and as a gift it sort of symbols that you give the person you love your time as well as a pretty object.

We started to look at ebay, esty and different antique shops everywhere we went. We quickly found that we both really liked the pocket watches in the early 1900's art deco style, preferable with arabic numbers instead of roman. They are so gorgeous in design, clean and simple but still with something extra. Like coloured hands, symbols along the edge, different materials and texture.
David found his in an antique shop one day in may and I found mine on ebay shortly after. We won it without anyone else bidding and the seller had described it really well with lots of pictures and details. It was in a great condition!

The watch arrived when I was in Scotland the first time and to our great dismay it wasn't working. David went to a watch maker close to our house and asked them if they could see what the problem was and if the watch was newly broken or if it had been like that for a long time. They couldn't really help without taking it in for a closer look and then we would have to pay them much more money than we bought the watch for in the first place.
David sent an email to the guy selling the clock and he was super helpful and repaid us directly and asked us to return it so that he could see what the problem was, because it was working when he sent it away.
I was so sad because I'd already fallen in love with the watch and to find something similar would be so very hard and time consuming.

A week or so later we got an email from the seller and he had found the problem. The watch was highly magnetic, probably from getting stuck in customs and their x-ray machines. Apparently easy to fix!
He asked if we wanted to buy the clock again, for a lower price, and hope for it to arrive in better condition this time. Of course!
Before he was going to send it though he wanted to carry it around in his pocket for a week to see if it wasn't sensitive to movement just to make sure.
We crossed our fingers and waited.
And then he wrote us to let us know it was working perfectly and he could send it, in a metal tin this time. We didn't have to pay him anything until it arrived and was working.
Isn't that amazing customer service!?!
It got caught in customs again and we held our breath.
One day it was here and it was working! Hurray!
I don't think you can understand how happy I was. This watch had already started to mean so much to me. It was my wedding watch. No other would have worked.

So by july we had our watches and the next step was to find somebody who could engrave them. It seemed like every engraver in Gothenburg was on vacation and couldn't do it before we left for Österlen.
Some of them didn't even want to do it becuase they were nervous of working on our old watches.
Luckily we found one that promised to have it ready in time.
When we came home from Glasgow our watches waited for us, newly engraved and ready for the wedding.

I wore mine in a short chain for the wedding but I want to have it in a longer one for everyday use because it's not really clever to have a watch in a way that makes it hard to read the time...

David had his in this chain for the ceremony but he is going to find a pocket watch chain so that he can keep the watch in his pocket instead.

At the moment in the ceremony when the wedding couple usually exchange rings we exchanged watches instead. It was really emotional when we hung the watches around each others' necks. I cried, obviously (I am a big cryer in emotional situations).

And here you can see my wooden ring as well.

My husband!!
One of the few photos I have of David smiling. He prefers to stay behind the camera so usually when I take photos of him he sort of looks really annoyed or he's making a funny face.

(Like in the picture of him a few photos above this when he thought he was smiling. HAHAHAHAHAH! No, that's not a smile. THIS is smile!)

Here you can see the inscription in the back. This is David's watch but mine is the same.
The date, our names and then Vi hör ihop, du och jag which means We belong together, you and me.
Words that mean a lot to us since we have quite the love story with us being a couple when we were 11 years old for the first time.
I think I will tell you that story some other day.

And now some silly and/or cute photos of us taken with the cameras' self timer:

I hope you liked to see and read about our pocket watches. I've been wearing mine almost every day since the wedding because I love it so much. It's really a token of sorts, and that was what we wanted.