Autumn is on its way

Although we are still technically into summer, the temperature has dropped quite much and for most of the Swedes there is no doubt that we are already in "autumn" and not in "summer" anymore.
For me it will take still a bit to absorb the seasonal transition, but it is because I am stubbornly convinced that this is not that different than many summers experienced here in Sweden.
Hence, why not call it summer since there are still about 20 days until the autumn is astronomically in place?

We are, despite all of this thoughts, preparing for the autumn to come and we were around searching for some blankets and throws when we had a really nice encounter with a couple of warm, cosy, original wool blanket and throw, one of which was also made of ecological wool.

Both of them come from Klippan YlleFabrik, which seems to not be that far from Lund.
The one on top is a wool throw called Polka.
The bottom one is instead the wool blanket and it is called Nymphaea. The nice thing is that it is double sided, since the back of it is white with black flowers, instead.

From the website it seems that there is a nice shop that one could explore and I am tempted to prepare a small trip there to cover some Christmas' wishes.

Growing green

Well, in reality it is also about changing "green", since some plants have passed away and new ones have taken their places.
Of course, we are speaking of our famous balcony.

First of all, my beautiful dalia died :-( The final blow was given by one of the cats, I don't know exactly what they did but one day I went up to water the plants and it was like they smash those tiny plants to pieces. There was no big hope anymore for them.
So I substitute them with something called "Aster" which I hope will survive a bit better :-)

The little plant of coriander didn't make it through the summer at all. When we came back from our holidays the plant was simply not there anymore and we had not have the guts to ask our neighbor what did she do with it...
Anyway, we decided to risk again with an "exotic" herb and we ended up with the thai basel.
So far, so good...

Finally, but definitely not least important, our cayenne chilly plant is growing so much that soon it will be a tree. Of course that is not the only visible detail because the plant is full of flowers, and even funnier, many little (and not so little) chillies are appearing everywhere.
I believe soon we will distribute them to friends for a tasting sample ;)

Nanako SoS

One of the most hilarious cartoons I have been watching has been Nanako SoS.
One thing that was the most funny was the voices of one of the characters. But in general, the story plot was unexisting but each episode was quite crazy and funny on its own.

Not so long time ago, they have finally published the manga and hence, I have grabbed it and read it during the summer.

It was not that many numbers to dig into, just 5, but the manga is quite...dense!
Some of the episodes are purely crazyness. There was no sense at all into them and I was really don't understand them, even though I tried to read them a couple of times.
But the comicity of it was devastating and it was really an entertaining read!
The manga differs a bit from the anime, for number of characters and story, of course, but the personality of the main characters was respected and that was what mattered!

A mixed post

I have so many things I would like to blog about, but for the moment I will limit myself to two.

First of all, I have retouched once more the blog graphics. This time I have corrected a tiny "misspell" in the header image, adding the right Swedish vowel. Secondly, since I got nicely pointed out that reading all the blab that I write with the previous color font could make a person sea-sick, I have changed it to a darker brown. I hope it has improved! Feedback is always welcome, good as bad!
Finally, I have improvised and this time, without the help of a tutorial, I have fixed the sidebar and added the same separator as between the post. So now the blog looks more coherent in itself. Fancy!
I still have the Chrome transparency issue on Ubuntu, but if some other geek wants to help me out with that I will be happy. I have sent a bug report to Chrome, but so far, they have just ignored it.
I think I would like also to have the pictures I post in some nice way. Fix the transparency of them and maybe a bit the border. But I am not sure I will do it also for the pictures of the previous posts.

Secondly. Let's change topic fully and talk about a game that we have been played about one week ago.
Arkham Horror. I think the main horror is the rules and the amount of cards that one has to display over its table. We just have a small expansion, but if one is geek enough, probably you would need to play on the floor to have the perfect area to play on.
The game is based on the novels written by Lovecraft, set in Arkham, a town in ...somewhere in USA.
Some divine monsters and other kind of creepiness are terrifying the town and the big Cthulhu one day, might decide to wake up and destroy everything.

So, the game is about being collaborating together in order to avoid that one of the Ancient Ones will wake up, by entering dimensional gates, exploring the other world, closing and sealing the gates and solving some other entertaining task, like killing various types of monsters.
All together, the game is pretty funny, but playing it the first time can be really a killer. Many cards, many rules, a lot of explanation that can be a good resolution if one suffers of insomnia, and so on, however, it is exciting to try to beat time (and the game itself) attempting to avoid all the catastrophes that instead the game is placing just in front of our heroes....

If you are an Arkham Horror freak, I really recommend to check this funny site:Indie Squid Kid. Hilarious against Carcassonne :-)

Some minor beauty changes

Yesterday, since unfortunately we couldn't fulfill our romantic plans to celebrate our third wedding anniversary due to sickness (it sounds like we could not fulfille a time plan in a project ;-D), I ended up having some free time to work on the "ugly" things of this blog.

I hope you can see the minor changes!
First, I have fixed the header name and the title of each post by changing font. I think this is much more readable!
I have found that I could drown into a huge amount of free cute fonts by looking at the usual homepage. It is there that I found "my" new font and I am sure I could have spent some more time looking there.

I then decided that I wanted to enhance the blog by adding a post divider. This was an harder task, mainly because I could not find a post divider that I liked (too many were just silly blinking GIF images with a terrible graphics).
Adding a post divider was a fairly easy step. It was enough to follow this guide.
So that was quick enough.
I then tried to revive my graphical skills, but by using GIMP and by not having the right image, I spent a lot of time without doing anything good (just wasting time :-( ).

Desperate, I was ready to beg the authors of The Cutest Blog On the Blog to fix a separator, when I saw that eventually among the extras there was something for me...thank God!


And now...what more I have to fix (excep the Google Transparency issue on Ubuntu that noone wants to recognize as bug?!?)

Puerto Rico

The other day we have had the occasion to play again one of our favorite board games. It is called Puerto Rico.

The one that finds the most efficient strategy wins. Well, there can be several strategies, the problem is that others might obstacle you and the game itself, having a limited amount of resources, doesn't allow to fulfill a static strategy.

The game is settle in Central America, just after it has been discovered by Cristoforo Colombo, in the 16th century. One has to produce resources that are typically for that area (corn, indigo, sugar, tobacco or coffee) thanks to the colonists and ship the products back to Europe. All of this generates money, which will allow to have buildings that will facilitate one of the phases, and will finally help to collect the points that will judge the winner of the game.

Nothing is said until the very end. It is possible to still win even though maybe the production is not as vary or intense as one of the other players.

Hope to play it again soon and win, this time :-) I have never managed yet!

A birthday dinner at India Restaurant

We have tried to find a nice indian restaurant in Malmö (the ones in Lund are quite disappointing, imho), and we have tried so far three places. The last one is the one that has been impressed me positively the most so far.

Ok, the name is not that original and if one passes by the place might wonder where did they pick up the sign that is blinking outside, it seems coming out from a american hamburger place from the 50s, however, once in, things start to change. The place is quite clean and had a nice and simple way of having the table prepared, but it was having a nice atmosphere. The menu was not extremely huge, but offered quite some variation.

Strangely enough, they don't even have an homepage. Or if they do, it is impossible to find. Anyway, by Googling one can find at least the contact info.

I have often wondered how indian restaurants can have a quite huge menu and I think I have realized that they have everything pre-made and what they cook at the moment is the meat, that then it is added to the rest of the sauces and stuff. This gives the side effect that often the meat/or whatever is not perfectly integrated with the sauce.

I think that issue here was most identifiable since the meat (we took a lamb dish and a chicken dish) was a bit dry. However, the taste was just amazing!We also took a vegetarian dish, that had some vegetarian meatballs and that was the best dish we took.
We even managed to squeeze down an ice cream, and that was nice as well.

I think we will pay some more visits to this place and probably, we will go less and less to the other restaurants we have gone previously instead.