I did real good today.

Until today I was under the impression that the days were getting ever shorter here in Sweden, as we slowly approach the winter solstice. I thought that it was a very stable process, devoid of lapses. I now know better. Today was the slowest day I have probably ever experienced. Longer than Midsummer Day, which is otherwise quite popularly referred to in context of any day length records. And today was also worse than Christmas Day, a very local swedish expression. You see, on Christmas Day you realise that all the fun associated with the winter has passed (i.e. Christmas Eve), and all you are bloody stuck with now is crap for the next couple of months. Slushy weather, darkness, coldness, greyness, a bit more darkness, wind, wet mittens, and slipping incidents. Today was a day back at school, for a mandatory PhD course in information retrieval.

I have today learnt to search for scientific papers in a database called PubMed. For six hours. Could have been very useful for me, had it not been that I have searched this database on a quasi-daily basis for the last three years. Even a slug would have caught on by now. But mandatory is mandatory. Now I have only one 'day-course' left, apart from the 4 'whole-week-courses'. I hope these courses will be something else than a tribute to talking very slowly, about quite obvious things, putting an 'eeh' or 'uhm' between most of the sentences, sometimes also between the individual words of that sentence. I guess these librarians teaching today had seen the expression 'rhetorical pause' somewhere, and today decided to take the thing to the next level.

To top this day of, I needed to shop for groceries (which I loathe completely!), and on my way back, my rear tire (with all the cogs for my 21 gears) dediced to deflate after wheeling over some stupid thorn.

But one should always try to find the bright parts, and desperately grip on to them, continuously repeat them as some kind of mantra (my cognitive psychotherapist taught me this). So here goes:
'I did real good, sitting in class for 6 hours, maintaining focus for major part of this time, I was so good going to the stupid grocery store, picking up lots of stuff so I don't have to return for maybe another week, I am so proud of myself for going to the tyre-pumping place after I noticed my flat tyre, (eventhough my blood glucose levels were real low, and I was quite annoyed from the grocery-thing) to make sure the tube was actually totally broken, I did real good today!'