Up, up and away!

Two more quick trips on the agenda before the year is over. This time, it is a couple of work trips to our office in Sweden, the first trip in the second half of October, the second trip in the second half of November. Unfortunately, we still don’t have a passport for young master Ethan, so the first trip will most likely be a quick 2-day solo trip for me but if things work out, Shaena and Ethan may be able to tag along on the second trip, and hang out in Stockholm for a couple of days while I am working. Our Canadian friend has, as we have mentioned before, moved to Stockholm with her husband to study. We might even go visit our friends in Gothenburg, who knows! Why do we even bother unpacking, one might ask?

”- So Peter, what are you doing in Stockholm then?” I am glad you asked! On both trips I am heading out to meet clients and deliver workshops on ‘job posting optimization for the internet’ along with a sales representative among other things. This is not something I get an opportunity to do too often, for obvious reasons as I am based in Scotland and my clients are mainly based in Sweden, so it will definitely be interesting to see how that is received.

A bonus whenever I go back to Stockholm is obviously that I get to hang out with my brother John, and this time I will get to see his new apartment as well. Looking forward to that!

Nerd-alert! Google Analytics is our friend!

Lately we have been researching ways to get new traffic to the blog and to find ways to better understand who is visiting our page. As I am working for an internet company, in my role at work, I am always conscious about the value of a good traffic flow, and am fairly acquainted with key metrics for what makes a website successful; high number of UV’s, a relatively low bounce rate, lots of views, good conversion, and returning visitors. What I didn’t realize though was how amazing Google’s tracking tool ‘Google Analytics’ really is! Shaena and I implemented the tool on the blog last week, and as the nerds we are, we have followed the development of the stats daily to see how it develops. A bit sad really.

With Google Analytics, you can really get down to a granular level and see everything from number of unique visitors, to traffic channels, which country and city your visitors are coming from, and even information like which web browser the visitors are using and what their internet connection and screen resolution is! And it is free!

To give you a little sample of the information we have collected so far:

- Our users are spending on average 3minutes and 20 seconds/visit on our site
- Approximately 65% of our users stay on the home page and never click on any titles
- 40% of our visitors go directly to www.harrisonhelin.com, the rest come in through referrals from other websites and search engines
- In the last couple of days we have had visitors from 33 cities in 10 countries, Sweden and Canada included. Sweden is leading the traffic to the site by far. (Dad!)
- 62% of our visitors are using Internet Explorer, (and only Michelle is using Google Chrome!)

We are gob smacked!

Ethan has to wash up for Kaloo too!

Introducing Kaloo!

Ethan has a new favourite toy! His name is Kaloo!

Kaloo lives in a magical land called Kaloomazoo and he only eats avocados. On Sundays he goes to his local shop and buys skittles so he can feed the ducks. Kaloo can fly and likes to fly around his town and dip in puddles and come home covered in mud (of course he washes up before he sees Ethan!)

This is Kaloo. His adventures will continue...

Thrift shopping

Today, we decided to check out a few charity shops, just to see if we could find any cool pieces of furniture for our already quirky home – storage more specifically. As you can expect, a lot of useless items end up in these types of shops. Let’s face it; people donate this stuff for a reason! You wouldn’t give away your newest clothes, your nicest furniture, your MP3-stereo or your DVD-collection, would you?

At the same time, it is interesting to just walk around and just look at things – it is almost as if you’ve traveled back in time, to a time where a season of ‘Friends’ would in fact fill a whole shelf in your bookcase and your music was stored on cassette tapes or vinyl instead of on iPods and a time when the plastic laminate on your furniture was most likely water damaged due to you over watering your plants.

Sadly enough, it seems like most of the items in the stores we visited could be categorized as ‘Grandma’s house’, i.e. furniture and decorations most likely purchased/home made/knitted in the 50’s and 60’s but still in pristine condition. The items were probably donated to the shops by relatives when the elderly owner did not need these things any longer.

Needless to say, we did not find anything useful to buy. Instead, we pulled ourselves back to the 21st Century by going for a snack at Starbucks. After our coffee break, we went from one extreme to another by visiting more swanky furniture stores where we did find very nice storage units available to purchase - all of which we could definitely not afford. Ever.

Once again, we will have to rely on IKEA to save the day with its new, shiny, reasonably priced, flat packed Billy, Lack and Expedit series' of livingroom storage!

Ethan is back...Back In Black!

I was a quick wet boy, diving too deep for coins
All of your street light eyes wide on my plastic toys
Then when the cops closed the fair, I cut my long baby hair
Stole me a dog-eared map and called for you everywhere

Have I found you
Flightless bird, jealous, weeping or lost you, american mouth
Big pill looming

Now I'm a fat house cat
Nursing my sore blunt tongue
Watching the warm poison rats curl through the wide fence cracks
Pissing on magazine photos
Those fishing lures thrown in the cold
And clean blood of Christ mountain stream

Have I found you
Flightless bird, grounded, bleeding or lost you, american mouth
Big pill stuck going down

Tommy Lee Goes to College

Those of you who has ever watched the show ‘Tommy Lee Goes to College’ can easily relate to this, as well as those of you who have never really studied much after high school.

Tommy Lee is the hard-core tattooed drummer of 80’s rock band Mötley Crüe, and a couple of years back, TV channel VH1 did a reality show about him going back to school to get a degree, and how he struggled to fit in to that world. Tommy Lee has always been a ‘work hard – play so much harder’ type of person, and for him to go back to school and really focus on learning new things and passing exams, was an interesting concept to watch, and I am sure a great personal challenge for him as well.

I have already established in previous entries that my company is a very good employer, and keen on employee development. Now, my company has kindly and graciously offered to sponsor me for a ‘Professional Certificate in Management’ through the Open University here in the UK. I am of course very grateful and will hop on this train as soon as I can. Can’t wait to take the next step, and Open University is definitely my preferred way of studying as I can study in my own pace to some extent and study whenever I can, on the bus to work, in the evenings, etc.

I never got around to studying after finishing Swedish ‘Gymnasium’, 12 years of school all in all, the equivalent of high school, because I wanted to start working straight away and I even started my own small business after graduating. After that, I have just kept working and have been very comfortable doing so. I am therefore a bit curious to see how this will pan out from a personal point of view. I am not worried about results and performance per se, it will just be a bit of an adjustment and a change in mindset to get the ball rolling on this.

As a matter of a fact, until quite recently, I had never even been inside a university, so picking up the books and figuring out study methods and ways to retain knowledge through study materials will probably be a bit challenging at first, but as with everything else, once you get into a flow and get a structure on certain things, you’ll be fine. Hopefully.

The course curriculum that I am set out to take looks great, and most of the topics covered will be very applicable to what I am doing in my current role at work, and I am sure the rest will come in very handy in the future. Hopefully, I'll also get an opportunity to draw from personal work experiences and my previous experiences from coaching and training. I bet Tommy Lee couldn't do that when he went to college!

The good thing with this course is that I can keep building on the Certificate and the next level would be a Diploma, and then I would be eligible for an MBA program – but that is way in the future.

I was always of the opinion that ‘you don’t need a degree to make it in this world…’ and I still am, but at the same time, it is one giant leap in the right direction.

The impact of a blog

Sometimes we hear back from people reading our blog, sometimes we get positive comments, sometimes we get negative comments, and sometimes people just read too much into what we are saying on our page.

It is funny, when we talk to our friends and family abroad and we start telling them a story, like ”Well, today we did this and this…” and the person on the other end says: “Yes, I know, I read it on the blog”. People also phone us with reactions to pictures they’ve seen on the blog, or something they’ve read, so usually a good conversation starter. The other night I even had to tell someone: “Well, if what we are writing on our blog is constantly going to spark such reaction with him, maybe it would be better if a) we stop blogging, or b) he stops reading!”

What is interesting about all of this is how impactful a blog space can be, and not only blogs but social media in general. Since Facebook really kicked off in Europe a few years ago, there has been articles in the news on crashed relationships, people getting fired from work for a comment made on Facebook, and also people meeting and getting married through social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace etc.

The number of times I have heard statements like: ”Yes, I know her, we are friends on Facebook” or “Are you alright? I saw your Facebook status!” and the number of times I have seen instant reaction when a person has changed their status on Facebook from ‘In a Relationship’ to ‘Single’. “Are you alright?” “Did you and George break up?” – Don’t people talk to each other anymore? I guess a lot of people have Facebook on their phones now as well, so no need to. On a positive note, people do tend to remember each other’s birthdays a lot more when they are members of a social networking site!

My personal opinion is that medias like the above are great for staying in touch and for sharing pictures and stories, but I also strongly believe that it has to be handled with care and looked at with a huge scoop of salt.

I love it when you call
But you never call at all
So what's the complication it's only conversation
I love it when you call
But you never call at all

Remember me,
I used to be the best time buddy
That you couldn't wait to see
But getting old, it takes its toll
And hearts getting broken lead to people growing cold
I'm flipping with a coin that's got a tail on either side

3 months left of the year – how much more travels can we squeeze in?

It is the 20th of September, so just over 3 months left of 2009. This year has been another busy, and of course very exciting, year for us with the baby and everything. So far this year, together or separate, Shaena and I have done a fair bit of traveling with trips like Greece, Mexico, Canada, Sweden, France and the United States under the belt but there’s still some more to come.

Shaena and the girls are going to Ballina, west Ireland, in the beginning of October for a girls weekend away and I still have a trip to Sweden for work to fit in before the end of the year. Also on the drawing board is another trip to Canada, provided that Ethan gets his passport in time. If we are really lucky, and if the trip to Canada works out for us, we might even be able to time it so that we can catch a KISS concert! Paul Stanley and the boys are playing a sold-out gig in Winnipeg. Shaena is connected though, so tickets should hopefully not be a problem. How awesome would that be?

We were also exploring a couple of other options; either a trip to Tenerife or an island cruise, but we are realizing that it is too much money for a week long last minute trip.

Shaena and I obviously enjoy traveling and seeing new things, but at the same time, it can be quite tiring. Here is a brief synopsis of an international flight for those of you who haven't had the pleasure yet:

The day starts off when you get on the airport bus in your home city, lugging a 40 pound suitcase to the airport at 4am in the morning before a 12 hour day on an airplane. Once airborne, you will: cross multiple timezones, eat bad airplane food from a small tray, be squished next to someone you don't know that is probably either trying to make conversation and/or is breathing heavily, and finally, just when you are about to fall asleep - you have arrived!

And then there is Christmas… or this year, maybe we should rename it KISSmas?

Ethan’s newest Godmother

It has been decided. The votes are in. The jury has reached its verdict. Ethan now has a Swedish Godmother to add to his collection of international Godmothers. We have asked Aunty Isabel back in Sweden to step up to the plate, and she gladly accepted.

Isabel has been very kind, thoughtful and generous ever since she got the news that we were pregnant and she is constantly checking in on Ethan to make sure he is alright, even though she is hundreds of miles away. We find that very admirable, and Isabel has also made sure that he has a bunch of really cool rockish clothes that he will grow into in the next couple of weeks. Can't wait to see him in that AC/DC onesie!

So, the list of Godmothers looks like this so far:

Canada: Jessika
Ireland: Orlaith
Scotland: Jen
Sweden: Isabel
United States: Maeghan

Welcome to the club, Isabel!

Sunday Smiles

Hungry like the wolf

Most of you who know and follow us know that Ethan is a hungry baby. He is eating and growing like mad, which is of course very positive (must be the Swedish viking heritage in him). Definitely better that he has a good appetite than not. Today we tried to add rice pablum (rice cereal in the UK) to his diet, and he did not seem to mind at all. He ate it all and washed it down with a bottle of formula. With the pablum to his diet, he didn’t want to finish the whole bottle either, so it seems like he is feeling full faster. It must have worked.

On the flip side; feeding a baby semi-solid foods is messy business! I guess we just have to get used to food in the face and all over the place, because in a couple of months he’ll be eating purées and apple sauce. By then, we could definitely use a 'wet wipes sponsor', so if anyone is interested, please let us know!

...and speaking of which: Here in the UK, there is a money appeal on TV for absolutely everything. For example, you can sponsor a starving child in Africa for £2/month or sponsor a mistreated donkey for £3/month. Yes, it is more expensive to sponsor a donkey than a child! So, I was thinking; maybe we should set up an 'Ethan appeal' where you, dear blog readers, get the opportunity to sponsor a growing child. How about that?

Bamse i Trollskogen

This morning Ethan made it through a whole Bamse saga! As he develops, his span of attention is getting longer and longer, and today he listened attentively to the storyteller throughout the whole saga, about 40 minutes, with exception for a few short spells of ‘pick-me-up-and-walk-me-around-cries’.


After the Bamse saga was done, we listened to music for a while, and then he fell asleep. Life is easy when you are 1/6 of a year!

Bamse – Världens starkaste björn ("The world's strongest bear") is a Swedish cartoon created by Rune Andréasson. The highly popular children's cartoon first emerged as a series of television short films as well as a weekly half page Sunday strip in 1966, before being published periodically in its own comic magazine since 1973.

Andréasson did all the artwork himself until 1975 and wrote all comics until 1990. Francisco Tora did all the illustrations from 1976 until he was joined by Bo Michanek in 1983. In the early 1990s several new illustrators were hired, including Claes Reimerthi and Tony Cronstam. Andréasson continued to do the magazine cover illustrations until 1992. The series somewhat changed direction when Bamse had children, specifically triplets, in 1982. In 1986 he had a fourth child, Lille Skutt having one at the same time.

Family life is now in focus, and here also the basic values shine through, like that of gender equality. In 1989 Skalman noticed that Bamse's fourth child Brumma was intellectually handicapped, which again brought up the subject of equality.

The children did develop in real-time within the magazine, but seem to have been fixed in age since around 1990. They are now around seven years old, in a narratively advantageous eternal state as first-graders.

Young Master Ethan

The Chronicles of Peter, Shaena & Ethan Ltd.

Recently I have been approached by a company called Blog Distributor. They liked the format and the contents of our blog, and they are now asking me to blog for them, or to write blog entries here on our blog for their clients in return for a certain compensation, to be more exact. The idea is that their client's links that I would include in my blog entries would be indexed in search engine search results, and in effect lead to more traffic to their client's website.

I have done a bit of research on the company and have been emailing back and forth with their representative, and it seems to be pretty straight forward. Obviously, as I am working in the online industry, I am a sceptic when it comes to money-off-the-internet opportunities like these, but all the reviews I have read so far are unanimous. I will keep looking around, but if it checks out, this could be a good opportunity to bank some money for Mr. Ethan.

Daytrip to Stirling & Falkirk

We had the rental car for an extra day, so what better to do than to go for a drive and see the sights. We had Emer (our GPS) take us to Stirling town, Stirling Castle and the Wallace Monument and finally Blair Drummond Safari Park.

The great thing with Stirling is that it is very close to Edinburgh, just 45 minutes away, and you really get the ‘small town feeling’ and you get a chance to get away from hustle and bustle at the same time. Stirling Castle was fantastic, in my opinion even nicer and more interesting than Edinburgh castle. We also had a chance, as always, to snap a bunch of nice photos and we got a couple of really nice family photos up there on the hill.

When we were done at the castle, the next attraction on the list was the Wallace Monument up on the hill across the valley from Stirling Castle. Very impressive and very imposing structure indeed! For those of you who are not familiar with Scottish history; the Wallace Monument is dedicated to Sir William Wallace – the dude from ‘Braveheart’.

After a quick look outside the monument, we set sail towards the Blair Drummond Safari Park where we got to see both cute and deadly animals up-close and personal. Really cool that you can go on safari and see exotic animals in muggy Scotland! We saw everything from sea lions to meerkats to penguins to lions and tigers. I am sure we will come back to Blair Drummond again in a few years when Ethan is a bit older.

The last stop before we headed back home, or back to the airport to return the car to be more precise, was the Falkirk Wheel in Falkirk. The Falkirk Wheel is an impressive feat of British engineering and is designed to lift boats that are driving into the locks for further transport into the Union Canal.

All in all, fun for the whole family! Below are a few pictures from the trip. Shaena also added more photos from this trip on Facebook that you can look at without logging in by simply clicking here.

Sgt. Long added to Facebook. Roger that. Victor. 10-4. Out.

"I enjoyed meeting ya'll as well. I'm always intrigued when I meet folks from other countries. Glad to have you as friends"

Jen & Mike's wedding

On Saturday afternoon, after coming home from the airport for a quick shower, we headed up to St Andrews for Jen & Mike's wedding. The ceremony was held in St Salvators Chapel on the St Andrews University grounds. Interesting fact about the chapel is that only St Andrews residents and St Andrews University alumns are allowed to get married in the chapel. It was a very nice service , and it was short and sweet, just the way we like it!

The reception afterwards was held at 'Rufflets Country House Hotel', a swanky restaurant and venue just outside St Andrews. The party started off with champagne, mingle and photos out in the garden and afterwards a fantastic 3-course dinner was served. As always in Scottish weddings, a Ceilidh (scottish country dancing) kicked off after the dinner and speeches were finished, and the dancefloor was packed with people who were able and willing to strip the willow.

Shaena has uploaded a ton of photos from the wedding on Facebook, and you can enjoy them without logging in by clicking here.

Here are a few pictures of us in our glitzy outfits... and the bride and groom:

Two teambuildings and a funeral

Early Wednesday morning we headed over to the office where a bus and other colleagues from the Atlanta office were getting ready to head off. We were getting picked for the 1½ hour trip to Callaway Gardens, Pine Mountain where the quarterly leadership off-site was taking place. The bus ride down south to Pine Mountain was nice and once we got to the hotel, we checked in and relaxed for a while before our first teambuilding activity.

The company had organized an ‘adventure day’ on the beach where we got divided into teams and were given a number of different activities to complete like; Frisbee golf, a sack race, an egg toss, a canoe race, team sandcastle building, a game of cranium, and a mouse trap rigging competition. It was great fun, and it was really great to get to know the Atlanta-guys a little bit more in an informal and ‘dressed down’ setting. They are a great group of people, and it was really amazing to see how Americans can pull together and root their team to victory. That is something we could definitely get better at in Europe. Tracie and I had practiced on our ‘Americanisms’ before we left, but were pleasantly surprised when we met the team. We had never heard so many “awesome!”, “good job!”, “high five!”, “we got this!”, “thank you!” and “you’re welcome!” in our lives. On the bus over to the beach, the noise of all the guys chatting away sounded like a bag of cats, but I’d rather have that than a group of people that only interact based on necessity and people that only speak when spoken to.

Later in the evening we had a great 3 course dinner with the whole group and a couple of drinks afterwards. Good times!

On day 2, Thursday, we learned all about effective project management and were also divided into groups for another team building activity relating to project management. In the afternoon, we all had some free time and the company had also organized individual activities; either a round of golf or a spa treatment. I opted for a nice full body massage, and man, it was a nice massage indeed. Afterwards, I was a bit dehydrated as expected, and the bones and muscles in my body were all pushed back into place and the therapist got so many knots out so when she was finally done it felt like I had been rolled down a hill, then been run over by a heavy boulder (Indiana Jones style) and finally been hit by a speeding bus, but it was awesome! I then took a long walk around one of the lakes, Robin Lake, in the gardens and made my way to ”Mr. Cason’s Vegetable Garden”, one of the mini-gardens at Callaway. Fantastic little plot of land with plantations of rare and common spices, vegetables, and flowers. Made for nice photos!

In the evening, everyone was wearing black attire because our vice president had pre-requested this; however we did not know why. When we got down to the restaurant we were greeted with a red rose each and were ‘welcomed to the funeral’. The theme of the night was ‘2009 Laid To Rest’ and we had a full-on funeral for the awful economic year of 2009 complete with speeches, a crying widow, Kleenex and a cake shaped as a gravestone with a raven on top. The cake was delicious!

On day 3, the meetings continued and leaders from our different teams delivered presentations directed to a specific other internal team and everyone got to critique their presentation skills to further improve the way leaders communicate and present. For me personally it was very useful and a good learning experience, especially the focus on ‘less is more’ when creating PowerPoint presentations and delivering data and facts to senior leaders.

After lunch, we all headed back towards Atlanta on the bus, tired but content with the week. The bus dropped Tracie and I off at the airport, and we had an overnight flight (on September 11th!) back to Europe to look forward to. The joy!