After a stress-filled hour or so when we couldn’t get in to the ticket website due to high traffic (well, stress-filled for me, at any rate — as I’ve said before, Olof is unflappable), we got our Simon and Garfunkel tickets! I made the mistake of converting the amount we paid in Swedish kronor into American dollars and that almost knocked the wind out of me. For some reason, Swedish money still doesn’t seem quite like “real” money to me, and I’m ashamed to say that sometimes that leads me to spend with something akin to reckless abandon. As far as the concert tickets are concerned, though, I keep telling myself that it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and that a year or five or twenty from now I won’t even remember how much the tickets cost but I will never forget seeing Simon and Garfunkel live.

Once we had secured concert tickets, we moved on to the task of buying airline tickets and were much less successful. We found a good fare for the dates and times we wanted and were pleased as punch with our good fortune, only to fall victim to the unspeakably bad (the word skitdålig* comes to mind) SAS website. We tried four different browsers and two different operating systems on three different computers and came up with nothing. You can go all the way to the “confirm and buy” stage, and then you end up with an “unknown error.” This is not the first time I’ve had this problem with that accursed site, but we’re more or less stuck with them, as they’re one of only two airlines flying out of Skellefteå, and the other typically has higher prices and a more restrictive schedule. Bah.

Our two or three days of summery weather appear to have been an aberration and we’re back to chilly temperatures. When Tage and I walked to pick Lydia up from dagis this afternoon, I had him decked out in snowsuit, snowboots, gloves, and winter hat and he was far from too warm. In fact, I wished that I had taken my own hat and gloves.

*literally, “shit-bad”