Where's the Kayak Trip office? And why not?

I found some nice multi-day kayaking trips in the archipelago near Stockholm. So today I decided to scope it out. First I had to take the pendeltåg to central station, then get on a subway to Tekniska Högskolan (Technical University) and then take a bus to Norrtälje. I really needed to go to Västermäs but I ran out of time. Looks like I'll have to try again next weekend - it's still too cold to kayak now, anyway. I took a few photos in Norrtälje . Be sure to click on slideshow. I had a quick snack and headed back to the apartment.


Coke also has it's "zero" add campaign going on: I saw three Zero adds at bus stops. They are self-explanatory.

J Speaks

Easter Weekend/Holy Saturday Post: Well, well, it's time I enter a blog. I am considered the "trailing spouse" in such corporate LTA (long term assighnments), and true to the name-here I'm trailing behind! I've yet to experience with D the adventures of Sweden as I am handling last minute preparations. (Picture me cleaning the yard of winter's remnants; dead leaves, broken tree branches, and of course the constant dog poop!) If that isn't a pretty picture, I am also having fun (quit my job 3 weeks ago) sharing the news with friends, meeting friends and my children for lunches and coffee here and there. Also, cancelling subscriptons, changing mailing addresses, visiting the bank, filing income taxes, and prepping the house for the August wedding of our oldest son. Then there was the one day D called and said "go buy long underwear....I've heard it is a must for the winters here"...and off I went. Also, I've run out for extra luggage and circuit adaptors. D has needed me back here to DHL (think intern'l Fed-Ex) papers back and forth that needed his signature. One day I visited his work 3 times and had to recruit all the secretaries for faxing, copying and notorizing. Thanks, girls....this is taking a whole TEAM!!!! Everyone there is just great. Whenever I am over there, I see people in the halls, etc. and someone always asks how things are going. It feels like family. Also, we couldn't do this without the support and enthusiasm of our 3 children. They are incredible human beings. Our oldest and his fiance are taking the dogs and our youngest will be staying at the house for awhile and taking care of it and our cat. What would I do without them?????? I will miss them the most.

I also needed to get all required immunization shots and my doctor visits up to date such as dental cleaning, physical exam, much of what was required for me to pass thru the immigration board. I am happy to say I passed thru and I have a work permit also! Will I work? Maybe...I will see. If I can go to D to Ireland or wherever, I'd love to have a flexible schedule so I can go. D was rushed thru immigration to get onto the job site asap. But for me....it's not SUCH a rush although I will happy to be a couple again. Can I say that again???? I will be happy to be a couple again!!!! Plans are for me to fly out Tues. Apr. 17th. I've loaded my ipod and started packing.

I did get to visit Sweden in '00 when D was there for a 6 mos. assignment, so I remember much about it. Living there for longer will be very different and I look forward to it and see it as a gift and a blessing. My job is to go and support D in every way I can. Also, I look forward to learning Swedish and seeing old friends whom I met both there in Sweden and here in the States. I've already bought some language CD'S and have started learning. I can't wait for the adventure to begin over there!!!

More on Taking Pets to Sweden

According to a representative from World Care Pet Transport, to get a pet to Sweden or most other European Union countries (England is said to be tougher), you have to do the following:

Go to the vet to get a micro-chip implanted. At the same time, get a new round of rabies inoculations. Vets aren't cheap.

Wait 120 days.

Go back to the vet so he can take a blood sample, which is sent to a lab at Kansas State University. Did I mention vets aren't for free.

Three to four weeks later, the blood tests are returned to the vet from Kansas State.

Ten or fewer days from departure to Sweden, the animal must have a special inoculation for worms. Can I charge it, Mr. Vet?

24 or fewer hours from departure, the USDA must certify the paperwork. This is the hard part which pretty much dictates a stay in New York to get the certification and still ensure the "less than 24 hours before departure" rule.

Good thing I was subjected to as much. (Although the medical exam did include the infamous over 50 standard procedures. "Have you had your colonoscopy?" asked the doctor. "You bet your KY jelly, I have and write it in the file bold with font size 500." I calmly replied and continued "I still have nine years, 7 months, and 13 days before I have to do that again.")

World Care Pet Transport will take care of the whole pet transport (20 pound cat) for a little over $3000 US. It's cheaper to smuggle narcotics.

Forms to National ID

Forms, forms, forms. Relocating to another country, even temporarily, involves quite a few forms. One of them is a medical report which includes an immunization report.


I got a complete physical yesterday but had a tough time digging up my immunization record. I can't even find my old Steppenwolf records, much less an immunization record.

After calling every single number in the yellow pages under "travel medicine" and still not finding where I got my previous immunizations (recall I had to take the deluxe immunization package when I went to India in 1998), a colleague recalled it was "Associated Internists." Good thing my colleague's memory is so good: I was within milliseconds of calling Guy Noir, Private Eye.

However, using the "Associated Internists" clue and Google I found that they had moved and changed their name to two names: World Wide Travel something and Beacon Medicine. Since my records were more than 2.5 years old, the time they decided to join catch up with the 1990's, my records were hard copy.
So I went down there for my appointment which was a good news bad news thing. The good news is that I'm about as immune as piece of granite and don't even need boosters for another 5 years. I could survive swimming in a vat of yellow fever, the hepatitis alphabet, and malaria bacteria. The bad news is that it still cost me $66 bucks. Who knows what the insurance was billed?



Then I had to take the signed immunization record to my general practitioner who is supposed to fax my complete check up results and immunization record to a doctor in Sweden. Seems like American medicine offers superbly trained doctors and miracle drugs but is still in the dinosaur age in terms of using computers, IMHO. Worse, the concept of fax'ing and mailing the completed forms (and reading the instructions) seemed foreign to my doctor and all her staff. I knew as I saw them shove the forms into my folder (and I'm not talking a computer folder, this one is made of cellulose) I'd have to call back to "make this happen."


Why do I bring this up?

Well, I've always thought we in the US should have a national database with all our medical records accessible by password. Furthermore, people should be able to mine the database for all sorts of medical data. Imagine seeing a map of the United States color coded by density of the flu? or any disease? Imagine seeing it change over time like a movie: from 1980 to present? Imagine how quickly the CDC could discover outbreaks when they used such maps (assuming doctors entered the data: Jo Smo has the flu on such-and-such data and his address is ...) The computer would use the address to place my data on the map. Correlations with weather, food distribution, pollutants, and all sorts of things could be done. Including not having to worry about clinics going out of business or changing their names!

Data is knowledge.

Anyway, it all reminded me of the national number that every Swede has. It's the same number as on their driver's license, simply transferred to the driver's license when the reach driving age. The number it self is coded. The first 8 digits represent their birth date. The next 2 represent the hospital ward they were born in (some hospital's have multiple wards). The next digit represents which birth they were that day. Boys get even numbers and girls get odd numbers (or maybe vice versa). If there are more that 5 girls or 5 boys born that day, there's a procedure for "creating" a new ward. The last digit is called a check-sum digit. It's value is chosen so that the sum of all the digits is a number whose last digit is zero. This is used to greatly reduce human errors when typing in the numbers into computers. Their computers are already programmed to verify the check-sum.

These numbers are tied to what books they check out of the library, their bank-accounts, their medical records, everything. The American Privacy Rights groups would break out in hives if some one in the US even whispered this. In fact, I may be followed by a guy in a trench coat for writing this. Let's keep it between us, ok? Anyway, the national ID sure makes Swedish society work like a well oiled machine.

I have no idea how Sweden protects against identity theft but knowing the clever Swedes, I know they've done something. I hope to find out.

I do know that if they loose their card. They have to get another but it involves receiving mail in separate envelops on different days: kinda sorta like our pin codes for our ATM cards.

There ought to be a way, maybe a voluntary system, in the US for achieve much the same thing (and more, as I mentioned above) and still maintain a modicum of privacy protection. We have the technology.

Perhaps one of my Swedish readers could elaborate on the Swedish id.

One Cat, Two Dogs

One of the biggest dilemmas before moving to Sweden is to decide what to do with the pets. Since Sweden and the United States are on excellent terms, the regulations are as simple as can be found (with the possible exception of Canada and Mexico). The rules as I know them are:
Dogs and cats must be re-vaccinated by a licensed vet and a lot more stuff.

Will we take them? We're still undecided because they are such an integral component of the family. However, having them limits where we can live in Sweden and also presents an "animal sitting" problem if we take any trips in Europe. We have the same problem in Colorado, though.

Preliminaries: Boulder to Plano to Stockholm

Dick and Janis moved to the Boulder area (Lafayette) in 1983. We've made many friends and raised three kids since driving in from Los Angeles in a little green Dodge Colt with our 1 year old son, Lloyd.

In 1994 Dick went to work for the Wireless Infrastructure Division Qualcomm which eventually was sold to Ericsson. In the year 2000, Dick took a 6 month assignment in Stockholm. Janis and the 3 kids joined him for part of that tie (they got to tour Europe a lot while he worked!)

In late 2005, Dick was asked to manage and grow the Plano R&D center for Ericsson on another six month assignment. The six month assignment was extended to 12. Janis took a leave-of-absence from her job and joined Dick for the second six months. The "opportunity" for a permanent re-location to Plano kept popping up. However, the gravitational pull of this opportunity was not strong enough to give up 24 years of friends, Janis' job, our mountain based hobbies, and our kids still living in Colorado. So back to Boulder we trapezed. (BTW, it's a very long drive from Plano to Boulder!).

The situation in the Boulder office (which has since improved) was such that Dick wound up being given a lay-off notice, which was expected. This was also an emotional roller coaster but Dick did discover that he's still marketable.

Then, out of the blue, a former manager of Dick's who had taken a high position in Sweden (but lived in Dublin) emailed Dick with an offer for a "Long Term Assignment" (LTA) in Sweden for 2 to 3 years. The position was a significant step up career-wise so Dick and Janis decided the "gravitational pull" was sufficient to accept the offer, not to mention the "adventure component" to the whole thing.

So that's the short story of how all this came about. We intend to get our kids out for some quality visits twice a year. We'd love to see you, too.

Sweden the First Time: year 2000

Dick took a 6 month short term assignment (STA) in Nacka Strand, a suburb of Stockholm in 2000. The Ericsson office, since closed after the telecom downturn in 2001, is shown in the photo on the right. There is a large statue spraying water over 100 feet high shown on the little "island" just above the boat. The statue was built by an American sculptor for some government in Europe. The government decided to decline the purchase so it was sold to somebody in Sweden, I guess the Stockholm city, and placed in Nacka Strand. The boats are part of the public transportation system: you buy tickets just like they were buses. The boat shown below is one that goes to a small island nearby that has two very good restaurants. You can view the island and the statue a little better in the second photo (unfortunately, there's no person in the picture to provide scale -- the statue is at least 100 feet high.



When Lloyd visited me, we kayaked from Nacka Strand but found it unnerving to be among the gigantic boats.

My office was on the tenth floor of the building shown. I could look out windows and be "even" with the decks of some of the larger boats! Swede's love boats, especially sail boats. I heard (but never verified) that there are 1.6 boats per capita in Stockholm. I believe it.

There is a phenomenology with extended visits. The first month is pure adventure. During the second month you begin to see flaws and become annoyed at anything that's not they way you're used to. Then in the third month, you start to appreciate the new way of doing things and begin to make friends. You find some things that strike you as better than the way you're used to back home.