Hej December!

The month rolled in gorgeous, and thankfully, after a 5-hour exam period of presentations on Tuesday, I have nearly a week off from school & schoolwork  (while Stu has a final exam on statistics on Monday!)  Let's hope it stays this sunny for a long while.

And with the beginning of December, we have enjoyed our last day of cable TV.  Quick recap: when we signed up for broadband back in August, the giant cable/internet company Comhem was offering 3 months of "large" internet + "large" TV for 99:- a month (about $13.)  So that's what we got. Which meant we had to buy a TV.   We thought it good to get one anyway to play our Wii, and so that Stu could watch his NFL sports package games on the big screen.  So I found a supremely cheap used little 20" on Blocket for 100:-. But it wasn't quite right. I know we're poor grad students, but it was fuzzy and small and we were spoiled by our giant flat-screen in the US. So I resold it (for a profit! Some kids working on window displays for the store Cheap Monday bought it for 200:-)  And we purchased a brand new, larger, prettier flat screen to play Wii on, watch football and watch our cheap cable.

But its the end of those 3 months, and this was our last week of cheap cable. We don't need to pay the normal 300:- a month to watch American TV. We haven't actually watched it that much in being here.  Don't get me wrong, its been great to actually *understand* the shows on TV, and we were getting Showtime, so that included some great movies.  But as poor grad students, its tough to rationalize all those sitcoms, especially when we should be reading about macroeconomics or museum audiences.

And for our final evening of television, we topped it off with a doozy. Or rather, a Razzie.  The ONLY thing on of even a teeny tiny bit of interest was an early 1990s Melanie Griffith & Michael Douglas movie, "Shining Through" about WWII spies.  Have any of you seen it?!?  I'm not sure why we stuck through the whole thing.  Melanie is a terrible actress, and that she talks sooooo slowly annoys the crap out of me. She is of Swedish descent, though!  Her mother was a Minnesota Swede who starred in Hitchcock's "The Birds." Oh, and Melanie wore giant shoulder pads this entire movie (even while in her bathrobe.)  Some wardrobe designer was channeling the 80s and didn't do her research on 1930s fashion.  It was really bad.

So no more TV. Or rather, only Swedish public TV. Which may actually cost more than Comhem "Large" TV.  Instead of explaining how we now seem to owe the Swedes 2.000:-  a year for Swedish public TV we don't watch, I'll let these Americans do it: TV Fees in Sweden and TV License.  I'm going to enjoy some sun.