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August 29 I was enjoying the Sunday morning when Håkan B. rang at 10 o'clock and asked me if I planned to go to the archives. I had such plans, but only after I had taken a shower, had my yoghurt breakfast, started a washing-machine and visited with my uncle at the nursery home on the other side of the town. My uncle was in a very good mood and very talkative so I spent two nice hours with him comparing impressions from our common family history. It was 16.00 hours before I arrived at AFU where I spent three hours. I tidied up a few corners here and there before tomorrow's filming in the archives, and finished my two week project of cleaning up the library from all sorts of things that had gotten stuck on the shelves from previous donations to AFU. The library is now just a library - not a general storage place! Here some fresh pictures of librarian's corner with bibliographies and encyclopedias (left) and the long wall (that continues into another room) with the T and U departments (Theories and Ufology).

        

August 28 Deciding about what projects to do with this day was a tough one! Life is choice between so many things. I decided, first, to do the updates for the past ten days, here. A period when many good things have happened. I have had a very active two week vacation period with almost no lazy hours at all, except for one or two evening hours of absolutely needed rest in front of the TV. Usually, it's been 8-10 hours of continuous work each day in 'the AFU system', mostly body work carting things along the street between our different facilities. Work that has left me with very sore feet each evening. Results are coming through - unfortunately with negative results for OTHER projects which should (also) have been on the extreme top of my list. But you cannot prioritize 'everything', can you..? I know only one man who can do (nearly...) everything immediately, that's Clas Svahn.

After much hesitation a biking tour into the country took place late this afternoon (after I had checked the weather forecast on www.yr.no). Not one drop of rain fell on me, but I was rather exhausted after roughly 50 kilometers on my bike. On the way home I stopped by the AFU post box at the gas station and also devoured a curry-tasting tutti-frutti pizza at the nearby pizzeria. I had the opportunity to see and photograph the two groups of community houses in Ljunga (left) and Kuddby (right) where we (my prof. work) will take over some administration on October 1. Some of the flats are free to hire, so if you are interested in a country house and maybe (also) some work with AFU...

    

August 27 Biked to AFU after some admin work at home (I registered the internet order for a mid-class A3 scanner and paid for it with my Visa). After coffee break (we were six people at the breakfast table today) I biked downtown with our latest PC (the one with blue screens) to exchange it for a better (hopefully working) one. No problem to get a new one. No growls at all. Later in the day Leif reported he had succeeded with the installation and upstart of the replacement PC. Lo! and behold, we now have two fresh PC's for this winter's upcoming work.

Then I spent a few hours carting the big batches of surplus magazines (created by recent donations from the UK, Austria and Sweden) from the library over to the 'D' mags archive for sorting & storage. Probably some 100 kilos, quite a sweaty job! Just as I had loaded the last two boxes on the cart, the left wheel broke down on it, and I had to fetch our other, smaller cart. Shall have to find a much better quality cart that suits our needs better. Yet another project on my lengthy list.

Lunch in Hageby where I bought copying paper, pencils and erasers for Ingrid (our librarian) and a lot of other needed office supplies. Nice to be able to buy such things without taking the money directly our of your own pockets! I am now, instead, setting that private money aside for an early pension.

August 26 In the morning I biked downtown to buy the second new PC for our digitizing projects. Brought it back, and left it in the able hands of Leif to be installed and tested. As I returned from lunch Leif told me that the new PC had a series of blue screens and a final message the 'Windows wasn't able to repair the damages'. It all probably meant a hardware problem.

Left AFU, as usual, about 19.00 hours and went home to find a suitable scanner on the internet. Seems there are roughly three classes of A3 scanners. More or less decided to buy one from the 'middle' class that will cost us about 5.700 SEK. We expect to keep the scanner rolling throughout the days and months so we need some quality.

August 25 A day for my 'new' uncle. My sister called me in the morning and we decided to visit uncle Sten in his new nursing home where he will train for a new life after his fractured thigh. Poor man, but he is in a good mood, joking with us and with the nursing staff! My sister and I decided to go to his flat to find more of his medicines and I needed some more papers to administer his economy. We managed to find a lot of medicines tucked away both here and there. Like many old people he has visited doctor after doctor with different recipes as results. I brought the big bag of drugs back to the nursing home for the staff there to sort out. I got home late in the evening after a long day spent mostly walking in the drizzly rain. Took a nice foot bathe to remedy my sore feet. 
August 24 AFU day with the final shelf work at the library and then cleaning up the storage room immediately behind the library. With time, the storage room has become occupied with literally tons of semi-waste objects that I cleaned out and lined up in the corridor outside of the storage. Later on Håkan B. came from his work and helped me to carry it all to the waste deposit rooms. I think I managed to get a good order to our storage of office supplies, shelves and furniture not immediately needed at any of our facilities.
August 23 Another AFU day with a crowded coffee in the hallway - a Monday. A new face in the crowd was Leif, who has finally started his 'Phase 3' work with us after a long summer's wait while the top bureaucracy was on vacation. We would have needed him two months ago! Leif has a competent background for working with us since he was a ufologist & UFO newsletter publisher in the 1980s. He will be the first to work with our scanning project.
August 21-22 Two days at the country house, moving lawn and doing 'agricultural' work (well, to some extent at least...). Håkan B. has been working at AFU, throughout the weekend, cleaning out the left room in our 'A' (administration) facility. He carried the picture libraries over to the 'C' facility (where it once was, some 5-6 years ago).
August 17-20 Four full (vacation) days mostly spent with tidying up in the AFU library. Since we had, lately, added a number of book shelves the complete book collection had to be 're-balanced' between the 80+ sections. A project I think I have done twenty-thirty times throughout my AFU 'career'! With every time it becomes a bigger and bigger project. The book library now contains more than 13.000 volumes! I know since I counted the copies in the database.
August 16 Having sent off this months 11.000 invoices, and after a cheerful 'bye-bye' to work-mates for a fortnight period of vacation, I redressed at home and went to AFU for a few of hours work with Håkan B. Together we managed to clean the library, our 'B' facility, from the remaining four shelves that arrived as donations on August 7 and occupied the center floor. When we put our minds to it we are quite effective! One old brown Billy shelf went into the library group of, by now, sixty+ shelves, replacing a white shelf which was rather out of place in the previous collection. The white one went into our 'F' storage behind the library, to keep company with two other, less fine brown shelves. And the fourth white shelf was ferried over to the 'C' facility. Could seem like a merry-go-round by someone outside of the AFU circus!
August 15 Another warm day with high humidity. Drops of sweat dripped on the two 90 cm IKEA Billy shelves we (Håkan B. and me) re-build at the 'C' archive which we project as the new picture library & digital department. 10 meters of new shelves donated by a kind donor in the Stockholm area!

Nine in the evening our sponsor friend Bertil came from Stockholm to spend the night reading report files in the 'A' archive. He promised to sponsor UFO-Sweden & AFU with 17.000 SEK for a a new server that, eventually, can be used for customer downloads over the internet. He also brought with him a number of interesting books including the new book on the Woodrow Derenberger case written by Derenberger's daughter Taunia Bowman. Unfortunately our copier crashed and Bertil's plan to copy a large number of documents failed. The copier wanted more toner, and I managed to crash the only toner package we had while trying to install the new toner.

August 14 A very warm day with activities at AFU throughout the day. Early in the morning, Håkan B. met up with Carl-Anton Mattsson our seller of antiquarian UFO-related books through the Parthenon website which he operates with Dan Mattsson. This arrangement is very convenient for us and helps us 'get rid of' books we do not need for the AFU library. Books that will then get a second, third or maybe fourth life? Nowadays AFU gets a lot of donations where books bear our markings since from previously being sold by us, maybe twenty years ago! Håkan also took the opportunity to use a few hours sorting our rich shelf of second-hand pocket books in English in A-Z order. Paperbacks are nearly impossible to sell on the international market but if you are looking for some particular title you are welcome to contact us. Even light-weight paperbacks (sometimes) have heavy-weight knowledge. We are rich in old Lorenzen, Vallée and Keel paperbacks.

In the afternoon (after I had emptied the AFU post box and had a nice lunch in Hageby) Håkan B. and I met with journalist Jan (Ove) Sundberg, his brother Kjell and Jan's friend Ingvar for a tour of the archives and reminisces of old times. Our guests had some remarkable UFO sightings to relate to us. A lot has happened since Jan last visited us almost twenty years ago: AFU has developed from two facilities to six, Jan has had his rows with us all (started by a review I wrote about his Phantom submarines book), Jan has been on the edge of death by cancer in his spine, and AFU has bought materials in four-five batches from Jan's rich collections. I had the occasion to tell Jan that his Swedish abductee interview tapes, bought in one of the batches from him, have been digitized and permanently saved for posterity by AFU. A rather unique material that Jan never found the time to publish in the book on Swedish abductions he projected. Pictures from Saturday's meetings on Håkan's blog here.

After the visit by Jan I spent another couple of hours alone at AFU, ferrying donated materials between the AFU facilities and I sorted & catalogued books & magazines recently donated by Swedish ufologists Tora Greve and Roger Ersson.

August 9-13 Another week lost at (professional) work doing interesting things, yes, but the alternative work at AFU would be a lot better. I reworked our database routine for collecting readings of electricity, water and heating from almost one thousand flats. The system is ageing and needs more attention with each year. With each month I am trying to raise the quality level of it all to help keep us free from making future mistakes.

Some of the evenings I biked to AFU to work with the continued sorting, distributing (between our (now) six facilities) and cataloguing of incoming collections... One of the fine book collections came from Englishman John Hanson and included never-seen UFO books by abductee Elsie Oakensen and Scotsman Ron Halliday. One evening Håkan B and I worked together on clearing up some things in our 'C' facility, carrying a lot of surplus things to the waste deposit. Few of us have a good feeling about putting new collections, received, into ugly age-old file folders that look like they already had two previous lives! To reduce transports along the street, we need to think out a clearer system for what we should collect (and not!) and in which of our six facilities one particular type of material should be stored. Sometimes it seems we are working like ants, running up and down the street! Having it all just under ONE ceiling would be a dream situation but we can't afford that. Yet!

August 8 Spent most of the day at home doing all the needed backlog of cleaning up, washing clothes, clearing up heaps of papers, AFU administretion and this web page. Quite a lot of things you can do in just ONE day, isn't it!!
August 7 The day when UFO-Sweden's store of magazines were moved from Enköping to Norrköping. Most of it went according to plan. We were happy with just a few drops of rain on the 200 cartoons crammed with magazines. The total weight of about 3,5 tons made it most practical to hire a big truck. Work started in Enköping early in the morning and continued in Västerås where further magazines, and four bookcases, were picket up. You can see picture from this phase on Mats Nilsson's blog. By noon the lorry arrived here and we were a workforce of eight people to ferry the loads down into our new basement facility. I worked putting up cartoons in the proper places at the final end of the chain. I had not one dry spot on my body after working 'down in that mine' for an hour or two. It was obvious we would probably have needed to rent a larger premises for the store! Let's see if we can put it into more & better order, eventually. I forgot my own camera but there are lot's of pictures on the Swedish blogs by Håkan and Clas.

I was happy when people called me out of 'the mine' and into the fresh air to help with unloading the four second-hand book cases at our library, a few houses away. We will evaluate if we can find places for some of them in the (already crammed) library. We need the shelf capacity but may have to move some of these shelves to any of our other facilities. After all unloading we all went to a downtown 'Mongolian' restaurant and paid a hefty price for a rather simple meal (with a lot of waiting). (We should have gone to Hageby to have a decent Swedish 'husmanskost' (plain food) at a better price). Some of us returned to the AFU main facility where we waited while Clas went to fetch a new collection which turned out to be a great surprise with lot's of early pictures from the early Swedish history of ufology. Excellent find!

August 2-6 I have spent the five days of this week mainly on two projects: At work I tried to complete the numbering of garages in one of our residential (with three field trips into the area) and, in the afternoons I spent 3-4 hours each day at AFU sorting and cataloguing materials from some 'difficult' old heaps of backlog materials.

On Wednesday the 4th I had a vacation day off from work. Met with Leif Åstrand to build the remaining four shelf sections of the magazine store. It all started with a failure - I had to bike to Hageby and buy a saw so that we could shorten some of the shelves. Who had thought of all the pipes close to the ceiling? Anyway, we did the work in a couple of hours and after lunch I spent 4-5 hours transporting this and that between our different facilities (now six!) in between cataloguing work.

August 1 A day spent mostly on the home (AFU) front, digging into the ever bigger and bigger heaps of work that no one else will do anything about, including the needed updates here... Doing magazine scans due to info requests to AFU, sending off emails, paying bills, etc.
July 31 Eight hours of AFU duty. First, I went to the new UFO-Sweden magazine store to continue the work I started yesterday. Built another three Ivar shelves. Håkan B. came over and built another four shelves on the other side of the room. 'After work' photos of two happy guys can be viewed on Håkan's blog here. In Enköping, Clas, his two boys and some of the UFO-Sweden gang were also hard at work preparing the transfer of the magazines from Enköping to Norrköping, see Clas's blog here. As Håkan had gone home to write his blog, I went for lunch in Hageby and then, back to AFU, where I put together two new IKEA office chairs for Anci and Ingrid.

After this day's portion of semi-hard 'body' work I put my brain into use with cataloguing a number of books and magazines from the Sören Andersson collection (see my new report on Recent donations).

July 30 At work I started up on a new project that will integrate at least four real estates with flats for the elderly, owned by the municipally of Norrköping, in our administrative work. Some 100+ new flats need to be coded appropriately into our system for letting, invoicing and other administrative work. My work is helped by the fact that one of the estates has previously been owned and administered by us some 15 years ago.

This weekend I will be in town for 100 % AFU work while fiancée is at our summer house. So, after work I went to our new magazine store to build the first two Ivar shelves that will soon hold the 150-200 heavy boxes of unsold copies of UFO-Aktuellt magazines since 1980. I had spoken to Leif - our upcoming Phase 3 co-worker, if only the unemployment agency bosses would return from their vacations and make a decision about him... - about spending one or two days together on this project, next week. On second thought, I saw, on the horizon, that there wouldn't be enough time to build all of the 13 shelf sections before the lorry of magazines arrives on August 7. So I started building the shelves on my own. I figured out that each section can hold a maximum of 30 boxes. That will be heavy, so we will spread out the boxes and use the upper shelves for easier loads like screens from the old UFO-Sweden exhibitions.

July 29 At work I spent the day in isolation carefully giving numbers to all the garages I had inventoried, in place, yesterday. This is work I just love! A typical good day 'off from reality' for the 5% Asperger soul in me!

After work I continued work on the Sören Andersson collection for 3-4 hours before biking home.

July 28 Spent the (prof.) day out in the sunshine inventorying some 450 garages in one of our (thus my work's) residential areas in the outskirts of Norrköping. The garages have not had individual numbers and database connections to the tenants, which creates much confusion when tenants call in and want some kind of repair work. It has been on my project list for many years...

After work I emptied the post box on my way to AFU, where I spent a few hours doing a first rough sort of the magazines received from Sören Andersson.

July 27 After six hours of (prof.) work Håkan B. and I went (in a rented car) over to neighboring Linköping to meet Sören Andersson, one of the many faithful old servants of Swedish ufology. Sören translated - in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s - hundreds (maybe thousands) of international UFO cases into Swedish, from sources such as FSR, APRO Bulletin and the MUFON UFO Journal. He is a rather shy linguist and collector of music now living in relative seclusion from current ufology. Håkan had phoned him to inquire about his collection which, in part, came from his father Sven Andersson and the local UFO society they had created together with friends in the early 1960's. Sören gave us a 'go' on taking over the collection as a donation.

We were first a little bit shocked when Sören didn't answer our calls at the door. It turned out he had gone out in the area to look for us and to guide us. We spent a nice hour talking to him about old memories while we carried heaps of books, magazines and some 40-50 colorful file folders to the car. You can see pictures of us and the collection at Håkan's blog here. Quite many elusive things in the collection! I made a mental decision to try and work myself through Sören's materials as fast as ever I can. A detailed report will follow in a few days.

July 26 Clas Svahn has received another parcel from Russia, reported today on Recent donations.
July 25 Read one of the fantastic new finds in the Schoenherr collection: a photo copy of Jan Hudson's (pseudonym for SF author George H.Smith) 1967 book Those Sexy Saucer People. 'The real thing' (not a copy) would cost about 500 US dollars and has never found it's way to AFU. Very interesting to read this text which is mostly documentary (about U.S. contactees) but with some apparently fictionalized stories. At least one story as a filler (chapter 4). It seems, however, that Hudson (Smith) has spent some time inside the contactee/New Age groups around the old contactees so the book offers some new angles - at least in my mind. His study is written from deeply ironic standpoints so this may explain why it never sold and is now very rare.

July 24 Took me a few hours to read the (combined) latest issue of UFO-Aktuellt and UFO (from UFO-Norway) - see pictures below. Two fine magazines that will 'upgrade each other' by joining forces! Swedish and Norwegian are very similar languages so it is expected that the readership in one of the countries will see the added material in the other language as a bonus and stay on as future subscribers. I have not seen the combined subscription figures but guess it will be roughly 1.000+ for Sweden and 500- for Norway? Both mags will survive - together. Too bad we didn't get the Danish UFO-Nyt onto the same train (with a Danish section in the centre - or how to solve that problem...?).

In the latest issue Clas Svahn reports on the continued co-operation with Swedish Defence after Eva Bernhardsdotter has been appointed as the 7th woman/man-in-charge of the official military 'UFO bureau'. Eva has worked for many years in the US (with NASA and other institutions) and has now returned to Sweden and a position as a researcher with the FOI which handle the official UFO reporting since 1965. UFOs, of course, will only occupy a very small fraction of her work time.

July 23 No time for AFU this day - heading out for the summer house. In the bag, though, a lot of reading material from AFU, including the latest combined issue of UFO-Swedens/UFO-Norways magazine. Very nice - see pictures below! If you read it from one cover it's in Swedish, if you start from the other, it's all in Norwegian. Very original - a model for international co-operation? A joint UK- US magazine?

    

July 22 A full day at AFU from 9 in the morning till 19.30 in the evening. Catalogued a lot of materials, mainly from the Luis Schönherr collection, particularly booklets and odd magazines. I must say that the Schönherr collection will generally upgrade the status of AFU's collection by many 'points' (as does the Hilary Evans donations)! There are very many booklets, manuscripts and essays on psychology and borderline themes.

Before turning off the light for the day I read a batch of Canadian Air Force document received fron Lise Theofanous in Toronto. Folio formats that are not very easy to find a suitable archiving for.

July 21 Four hours at AFU, after work, cataloguing a batch of very interesting materials from Philip Mantle, including three of his recent books, see more on Recent donations.
July 20 Trying to upgrade my sister's laptop from Windows Vista to Windows 7. It will probably take all evening.
July 19 A Monday and a vacation day from (regular) work. Spent 10-11 hours at AFU from the early morning to 19.30 in the evening. Håkan B. (right in the middle of his summer vacation) and I had decided to put the 'C' facility in a better shape for the upcoming autumn season. We needed to create three new workplaces for new people.

First, I carted a large number of IKEA Ivar shelves from our 'C' facility over to our new '165' facility, which we have rented for the UFO-Sweden magazine store. Took me some ten trips and three hours along the street, in the warm sunshine. Sweat, sweat (and even a little blood)! While I was doing this Håkan built four new white IKEA Billy book cases for our sales department. Pictures from our hard labor on Håkan's blog here. As we had moved the sales books into place (not sorted A-Z yet, though) we also put up two IKEA Ivar sections in the inner room, for storage.

I then spent 3,5 hours updating our book and magazine inventories with a number of very nice and interesting items brought her from the collections of Englishmen Hilary Evans and John Hanson. Some extremely unique additions, including many of Hilary's nice volumes of conference proceedings and bibliographies, typically in Hilary's orange-red bound volumes. Prides for our shelves!

July 18 Resting at the summer house after yesterday's adventures! Fiancée was extremely tired and so was I. Fiancée's vacation is now over and she's not happy about that.
July 17 Guests from Örebro at our summer house throughout the day. In the evening we went to the nearby pizzeria for another meal. While there the heavens opened up and old thunder god Tor started to roar like a madman. You should have seen us rush to and from our car, trying to get back home from the pizzeria. Not a dry spot on us!
July 16 Three hours at AFU cataloguing monographs and booklets that arrived with Clas Svahn from Hilary Evans. The materials from Evans are always first class and included a copy of Hilary latest book (with Robert Bartholomew): Outbreak! The encyclopedia of extraordinary social behavior. In the post box I found a new agreement to sign with the unemployment agency. Mailed it off hurriedly since it had been resting in our post box probably for about a week.
July 15 Håkan B. and I met a young guy who is trying to recover from drug problems and needs a place where he can do something interesting, two days each week. We plan to engage him in the new 'digital' group we are putting together this autumn for digitizing files, magazines, picture libraries and audio tapes.
July 14 Monthly invoices sent at work. 3-4 hours at AFU after work cataloguing booklets and magazines from Hilary Evans and the BUFORA archives.
July 13 Three hours, after work, at AFU with the usual cataloguing. A never-ending project.
July 12 First day of work after the three-week vacation. Could only stand it until 15.00 hours when I went to AFU for the daily hours of catalogue work. I am now cataloguing small booklets and documents into the book database. Some of them cannot stand by themselves on our shelves without protective covers and these items I sort in a heap by itself, while books and more 'stable' items are put directly on the proper shelf.
July 11 Last day of first vacation period this summer. Biked back to town early in the morning while it was still some fresh air to breathe. 30-32 degrees (in the shadow!) during the past few days so the only chance was biking very early in the morning. After coffee and shower at home, and some needed AFU administration, I biked - in the hot air - to AFU where I had a short talk with Håkan B who had also fled from the summer heat down into our very comfortable 'air conditioned' cellars! He was sorting papers for our personal and organizational archives, a project Håkan will continue during the upcoming few days which are part of his summer vacation.

I spent most of the afternoon in the library cataloguing small booklets that came with (primarely) the BUFORA donation. Some very fine additions that will eventually be found in our inventories.

July 7-10 Vacation days. Biked out to the summer house on Wednesday morning and stayed there until early Sunday morning when I biked home. On the Thursday, however, we drove back to town. Fiancée treated me and our friends Kicki and Magnus to a nice evening dinner at Pappa Grappa's Italian restaurant, downtown. Three of us ate swordfish for the first time in our lives, followed by tiramisu and coffee. Extremely nice and paid for (mostly) by a generous gift check from fiancée's boss for doing a very special job last year. If I am not completely wrong I helped here with that job so I was eligible to take part in the party!
July 6 Twelve hours working for AFU! Ordered another two USB-connected tape recorders for the audio tape digitizing project. Benny has already almost worn down the first one in just a few months time. He works continuously, hour after hour, day after day, which wears out the equipment. He has digitized hundreds of valuable interview tapes and is doing a fantastic job...  Biked to AFU and from there to the main post office on the other side of the town to fetch another heavy parcel from Ole Jonny in Oslo. He had packed a large number of books, tapes and magazines and also a few old books that I shall have to ask him where the 'UFO relevance' is!?? Sorted most of it, photographed it for the credit note on Recent donations today and put appropriate labels on some of the items for future credits. Wish I had the time to awork systematically like this, and take first care of the material immediately as it comes in, but this only happens during my vacation from work.

The remaining part of the day I used for the Schoenherr magazine collections where I inventoried & catalogued the (about) 35 binders of MUFON UFO Journals (26 new issues in our inventory!) from the period 1974-2010. A fantastic addition (see photo below, left) but, but... who needs them now, when all of this has been scanned and digitized?? The same goes for the FSR's (right, below, also from Schoenherr) and BUFORA publications we have on our shelves. Waste of space?

July 5 The annual AFU Åke Franzén Memorial Cup (well, we don't have the cup - yet - just the honor...) of miniature golf in the Vrinnevi woods, pictures on Håkan B's blog here. Out of a record number of ten contestants I came in the honorable last place. There are several excuses (pick one): 1) the contestant with the most points is of course the winner (everyone else, unfortunately, sees it the other way...), 2) my one remaining eye does not give me the 3D vision for hitting the ball and 'measuring' the golf course correctly. Alternative two is probably the more realistic. Anyway, Sven-Olov was the unbeatable winner. After many laughs on the course we all had a cup of coffee (or in Benny's case his usual coke) and a sweet Saltängs-bun. I leave it to the reader to ponder over what a Saltängs-bun is!!

After a lunch with fiancée at home I biked back to the archives and spent 2-3 hours cataloguing magazines from the Luis Schoenherr collection. Very nice professionally bound volumes of Flying Saucer Review and UFO-Nachrichten! Unlike some of the previous FSR bound volumes we have had donated to us, the one who did the job for Herr Schoenherr understood to include the front and back pages of the FSR issues where there is always much essential information! How does anyone think when they mutilate a magazine by cutting out and throwing away the front and back pages, as has been done in several cases of materials donated to us?? What kind of preservation is that?

July 4 A silent Sunday at the summer house with another book by Gerda Antti. I am now into my third book by her. I like her - she has a nice distance to many everyday occurrences in our half-crazy world. Very Swedish - cannot imagine that you can find any books by Gerda Antti in English - but who knows?
July 3 Fiancée took me to Linköping for the voyage 'into the blue' she had promised as a birthday gift. I had already guessed that it was to be a tour to the re-opened Flygvapenmuseum, the Swedish Air Force Museum. We visited the museum some 20 years ago, but after a recent expansion it is now all brand new and much, much bigger. The museum has also broadened it's scope to subjects such as the Cold War and the nuclear threat, the submarine hunts of the 1980's and related security issues. In the bottom (cellar) floor there is a display of the salvaged DC-3 wreckage, a Swedish radar reconnaissance plane shot down in 1952 over the Baltic.

There are several 'lab' rooms with modern computer gadgets for the kids, who seemed to just love it! There is also a hefty flight simulator that you can try for 50 kronor. If the archive-and-library had been open I would have left my fiancée alone in that lab, with her glowing eyes! Unfortunately, however, the 'knowledge area' was closed. I was otherwise curious about how they had arranged the library/archive but shall have to come back some other day. I always like to tap into what the professionals are doing. I am thinking of taking the train and bus some day this autumn to see the 1.000 meter archive and maybe bring some AFU colleague with me.

On our way home we stopped by at IKEA and discovered that they had probably withdrawn the 8 cm high KASSETT boxes we have always bought for our audio tape collection. I shall have to check this up - we need more of the boxes for effective preservation of our growing tape collection!

June 30-July 2 Three hot summer days at the summer house. My nephew (sister's son) has become, sort of, our janitor at the house. The kinds of 'manly' work I dislike so much, he regards as great fun so it is a win-win situation.
June 29 Been cataloguing donated magazines from Dennis Plunkett (BFSB), Robert Moore, John Rimmer and John Harney at the archives, before going to lunch. After lunch started off with the magazines in the Luis Schönherr collection. Schönherr's files of Pursuit (where he was for many years a regular contributor) is a major addition for AFU. It covers volume 6 and onwards. Will now go to the summer house for a couple of days of rest. I have a summer vacation (sometimes forgotten).
June 28 Second week of my vacation from work. Two major AFU events today: delivery of two pallets of new furniture from IKEA and helping to move the home of AFU co-worker Håkan L. Both seemingly went well. Me, Sven Olov and Susanne from the archives also helped Håkan L to move into his new flat on the ground and with a nice patio. But...carrying everything four stairs down in the warmth took its toll on us all. A lot of water and Fanta was consumed! The IKEA shelves and office chairs are now all in store at our 'C' 'distribution centre'. In the morning, I had a phone call from the unemployment agency, and also from Leif, about his proposed 'Phase 3' work with AFU. We have to make a new application via the internet but it will probably work out fine within shortly. As I was at home writing the application, well after 11 in the evening, my new neighbors upstairs started a big fuzz. It was like they were sorting a large number of bottles on the floor (which is my ceiling). The noise was so terrible I had to leap the stairs and ring their door. It seems the guy was working out with his new gym! OK, but not after 11 in the evening according to Swedish law.
June 27 Spent a second day reading the 2003-2005 volumes of the classic Flying Saucer Review magazine. FSR lost most of their correspondents during the Creighton reign as editor, due mostly to Creighton's slanted comments that broke into all texts published. The FSR 'tradition' is continued by the new, rather anonymous editorial board. To gain back the reputation I think FSR will have to 1) keep a straight(er) line between articles/contributions and finger-pointing editorial commentary, 2) re-recruit at least some of the old contributors who were more thoughtful and broad-minded in their analyses of UFOs, and who contributed fine field investigations, 3) recruit at least one photo analyst to help them with better assessments of the large number of probably spurious pictures published from all parts of the world. My comments does refer to post-2005 issues, I will try and follow up with more recent issues I might locate at AFU.

Fiancée drove me and sister back to town and I will sleep the night to Monday in my wide (and best) bed.

June 26 Several hours of the afternoon spent in the nice city of Söderköping, by the Gota Canal which runs across Sweden. Met Johan and Sandra. Johan, who has worked at AFU in the old ALU projects (1990s), was to celebrate his 40th Birthday during the weekend. Even young guys are getting old...
June 23-25 Summer house for Midsummer holidays with fiancée and sister. Had brought with me newspapers for cutting for my clipping collection on real estates in Norrköping.
June 22 Half-a-day at AFU finishing the cataloguing of the magazines from Philip Mantle. IKEA phoned and confirmed the delivery of new shelves and office chairs next Monday (the 28th).
June 21 Another full day at the archives - the first day of my main three week summer vacation. Met everyone at the archives including Benny, who came with a new delivery of digitized files for download on our hard drive and fetched a batch of audio tapes. He is truly a hard-working man! Before lunch in Hageby I carted 16 heavy boxes of for-sale-UFO-Aktuellt magazines from our 'C' archive (where they occupied a place needed next week) to the new magazine storage. Haven't decided yet about any name for that facility but with our letter system it should become the 'F' or 'G' or maybe 'U' for UFO-Aktuellt/UFO-Sweden? The simplest is probably to use the address number of each facility. AFU is more and more becoming a 'logistics' concern.

After lunch I spent several hours at the 'C' archive bringing more order into things. Our collection of surplus Swedish clippings, kept in 15 card board boxes, were placed on top of a five-section shelf, close to the ceiling, where they may be consulted (on a ladder) when needed (not more than once each year).

In the evening Tobias phoned and came by with the AFU economy file folders for the years 2005-2009 which he had audited, finding but one (minor) mistake. We talked over a coffee and consumed the final bits of the jam roll that Tobias' brother-in-law (Benny) had brought. After Tobias had left I brought another batch of UK magazines (first parts of Mantle collection) over to the library for cataloguing. A total of nine hours at AFU this day - then home.

June 20 Sunday at the summer house with fiancée, my sister and fiancées mother and brother. A day lost in sunshine and good food.
June 19 Lovely Swedish Princess Victoria married Daniel, the love of her life. Daniel all of a sudden became a Prince as when the princess kissed the frog in the children's fairy tale! Prince Daniel (and his father) made a success of it all with their wedding talks and the weather was just right for the occassion. I used most of the day relaxing and watching the TV reports of it all. For once, something positive in the news but there are (of course) always acid souls who want to abandon all traditions. Håkan B took delivery, at the archives, of a car load of materials from Irre Bredin that included a lot of office supplies we can make good use of in the future.
June 17-18 Last few days at work before summer vacation. For once I am reasonably on schedule with what's expected of me at work. After work on Thursday I biked to AFU and spent another 3-4 hours with the first basic sort of the Philip Mantle donation brought from the UK.
June 16 After work: four hours in front of the library PC cataloguing magazines from the BUFORA and John Hanson collections. I am now at letter 'S' in the heaps labeled 'John Hanson'. Some confusion has arisen on our shelves between what came from the UK in Clas Svahn's car. Obviously some magazines from BUFORA were labelled 'John Hanson' - or even vice versa...? Both donations are great, and in the end we will take the best care of it all, even if our crediting in some cases may be a little wrong.
June 15 After a few hours cataloguing magazines I biked home and put myself in front of the home PC. Ordered new shelves from IKEA 20 sections of Ivar and six sections of Billy shelves, plus two new office chairs. With transport this amounts to 24.000 SEK. Delivery expected on June 28, a Monday during my vacation. Mailed the unemployment agency to get their approval for Leif Åstrands 'Phase 3' position with us. Hope it works out!
June 14 Another repeat performance: three-four hours cataloguing magazines at AFU. I feel like I am the drop that slowly penetrates the stone! Followed a discussion on the EuroUFO mailing list about projects to scan magazines. From my point of view this is, in part, a project that is way too over-ambitious and unrealistic. Some people don't understand what an archive is - and the truly HUGE amount of information & papers we are collecting on our shelves. They just want 'everything' conveniently available for free PDF download on their home PCs. The bigger, more professional archives are having quite some trouble satisfying 'the new internet generation'. This I read, recently, in the magazine for professional archivists we receive as part of our membership in a national archives organization. Our 'troubles' are not unique.

This evening Håkan B and I met Leif Åstrand, an ex-ufologist (25-30 years ago) who is now back in Norrköping and out-of-work. He wants a 'Phase 3' two-year period with AFU. We could make good 'use' of his experience with UFO phenomena so we will go for it!

June 13 Saturday and Sunday at the summer house with a batch of newspapers to scan for clippings and articles on Norrkoping real estates, plus a number of new UFO magazines to read before they go into the system of circulation and archiving. This happened in between moving the lawn and other things to do. UFO-Sweden's Håkan Ekstrand celebrates his 60th birthday today - our UK contacts know Håkan as the faithful co-driver to Clas Svahn when they drive to Britain to collect UFO/fortean collections for AFU. Håkan was also one of the instigators of the early Norwegian-Swedish Hessdalen project.
June 12 Email arrived from Susan, a librarian in Oklahoma who wants a position with a UFO library like AFU's, but in the US. She wants to work in a library or archive that focuses on UFO research and folklore. Well, I cannot think of any such institution besides CSI (the Skeptics) who would have the resources to pay salaries for a librarian, so I will write Susan making such a suggestion.
June 11 A few hours in the evening and I finalized cataloguing of the BUFORA magazine library - I thought then - see further on June 16, above.
June 10 Again, a few hours after work cataloguing and sorting BUFORA exchange library magazines whose titles all start with the letter U - a prominent letter in all of our inventories!
June 9 Talked to an ex-ufologist who was active in the 1980s and is now out-of-work. Håkan B and I will meet with him on Monday to discuss a job within our 'Phase 3' project for out-of-work people. He may become the 6th soul in our project. After work, me and fiancée transported our old motor lawn mover to the refuse tip for scrapping.
June 7-8 Days lost at work! Summer vacation coming up in a couple of weeks and a lot of projects that need to be completed at work.
June 5-6 Days lost at the summer house! A rather warm summer-like weekend. Finished reading the Tesla book in Swedish I recently bought for the AFU library
June 4 Has spent the work hours this day (and yesterday) trying to get up-to-date with my regular job of changing the monthly rents (this month for more than 125 tenants) where we have recently made major changes to their flats. In most instances the tenants have ordered a new floor, or the preparation fittings for installing a new dishwasher or washing machine.

After work I biked to AFU and spent a few hours cataloguing the BUFORA collection, this afternoon the titles beginning with letters R, S and T. Some big holes in our collections plugged. Then biked to empty the post box. The usual mix of invoices, magazines, new clippings, plus the nice monthly requisition for money for the cost for our Phase 3 staff. As responsible for AFU's book keeping I will never get used to having a steady incoming flow of money - or will I..? Tobias Lindgren mailed me that he had audited the past five years of AFU book keeping and was ready to discuss it with me some evening soon. So then we can finally have our long awaited board meeting and get back on regular tracks with the AFU foundation. We are a very active board with almost daily contacts on the phone and by mail - yet we need to meet for deeper discussions and the necessary formalities!

June 3 Another three hours cataloguing the BUFORA magazines - tonight the titles beginning with first letters L-Q. Very few complete volumes but many small holes filled - here and there.
June 2

A short day at work, just a few hours, before going to AFU and the continued work with cataloguing the BUFORA collection. Magazines starting with letters D-K, today. Rod Dyke mailed during the weekend pointing out that AFU is just lousy with sending exchange materials back to him and his AUFOR (which also means Archives for UFO Research) in Bainbridge Island (close to Seattle). Shall have to remedy this situation during the summer! By the way, Rod is busy sorting out the latest 1.000 kilo collection from the estates of Richard Hall and Donald Keyhoe.

June 1 A full day at work and then home for a short rest, before going back to our six more hours of 'work', the spring 'kick-off' at the newly inaugurated Visualization C centre here in Norrköping. My place of work happens to be one of the 'gold sponsors' behind this new planetarium, which operates a 15 meters wide projection dome for visualizing voyages in space, voyages inside the human body, or anything else that requires a visual presentation. The project has been planned for 10+ years and is an international co-operation between our local university and visualization gurus in the US. The 'C' ('see') centre is at the absolute forefront internationally. AFU has been asked to supply a Swedish UFO photo for the museum on human vision connected to the centre.

In my picture below you can see Professor Anders Ynnerman of the university presenting the C centre to the 140+ workmates of mine, assembled on the bridges surrounding the centre and planetarium nicely situated by the water:

We were given a repeat performance of the Swedish King's opening procedure of the centre, just five days earlier, and sample shows of visualization films to be on the repertoire, most prominently a voyage to the end of the universe and back again. The evening ended with a nice dinner and a live show by Swedish artist/rock star Markoolio. A very nice evening that ended around midnight. The dome shows that I witnessed pushed new ideas into my head, where AFU could possibly provide the basic data for effectively visualizing UFO reports. If anything, UFO sightings are visual!

May 31 I was born on this day exactly 60 years ago! Becoming of age has mixed feelings, everything from slower mornings, to trying to live a less stressful life (often failing, due to commitments). Me and fiancée had a day off from our work. We slept late and went about like zombies-in-slow-motion, spending a few hours shopping clothes at the new Hageby centre.

In the evening we combined my birthday with a nice AFU 'staff party' at a local restaurant. We were no less than 16 past and present co-workers! The nice dinner, paid for by AFU from our Phase 3 money, was a way of showing our gratitude to all those people that work for us. You can view photos from the occasion on Håkan Blomqvist's blog, here.

May 30 Went to our summer cottage with fiancée and sister. Sister had baked a very nice strawberry cake to commemorate my upcoming 60th birthday - tomorrow.
May 29 Up at ten from bed. After breakfast biked in the slight rain to AFU:s sorting facility to continue sorting the BUFORA magazine donation in detail from A to Z. You can see the final result here, fifteen heaps:

After biking to the post box, and a nice lunch at the new big Hageby Center ('the World's Centre', well, well...) with coffee, back to AFU. Prepared some new clippings for scanning and distribution on our 'AFU-Clippings' mailing list and then started to catalogue the BUFORA mags. Managed three-four batches of mags in the A to C span. Some VERY fine additions to our files!! Then home for the Eurovision Song Contest - this year without Sweden. First time we didn't make it... Will have to hold thumbs for Denmark or Norway then... Both of their contributions are written by Swedes, as are four other contributions! So Sweden rules, despite the failure for our domestic song.

May 28 Up early to leave at nine for Örebro and a visit with mother-in-law. Mother's Day on Sunday but Friday will do. We drove her to the local Tax Agency to get her a new ID card. While at the tax office I browsed the many free brochures available. Brought with me some recent brochures on taxation regulation for foundations (as AFU is) to read at home. With me to Örebro I had brought the Tesla book I bought yesterday. Nikola Tesla fascinates me. Not that I understand much of the technical contents, but the genius man is fascinating. One but wonders how much is truth and how much is after-construction and myth? Tesla himself - who has written most of the texts of the book - is NOT the most MODEST of men!
May 27 A normal workday, the last before four days off from work. Had lunch at the community library and outside the library I met Håkan Blomqvist who was selling ex-library books cheaply from tables near the entrance. Not having much time, I just went up to one of the book carts and immediately found the Swedish edition of a book by Nikola Tesla that I bought from Håkan for the AFU library. Just ten crowns. A nice new reference item. Decided to read it myself before donating to AFU. On another front, according to his blog, my AFU colleague Clas Svahn has today had his first briefing/meeting with the new official Swedish UFO investigator, Eva Bernhardsdotter, who is the 7th official FOI UFO Investigator since the days of Tage Eriksson, who featured in the old Condon report. Eva is very interested in UFO phenomena and will probably take part in the UFO-Sweden field investigator course this autumn. She is uniquely suited for the job with backgrounds from NASA and the Swedish Space Agency.
May 26 After work to AFU where I spent four hours cataloguing all the magazines that just arrived from Hilary Evans in London. Cataloguing mags has become a little complicated since 1) material is being sorted in the 'C' facility, 2) I can only update the database (due to Access problems) in the 'B' facility, and, when cataloguing is completed, 3) the magazines are carried to the 'A' facility for Sven Olov's part of the job. Then, 4) Sven Olov finally carries the mags to our 'D' facility where they are permanently stored in our compact shelf system. Not very effective! Just think if we could have everything under one roof!? Anyway, I will buy a new computer next month for the 'C' facility so the database updates can be made there.
May 25

In the picture the gang who cleaned our library today (left to right): Patrik, Elisabeth, Carina, Håkan and Susanne. We started out before nine in the morning when Patrik and Carina arrived from Åtvidaberg. Patrik is a regular borrower of books. He, and his lady friend, offered to help us clean up the dusty library, some months ago. An offer we readily accepted. With six pair of hands and the backup of Sven Olov, who helped with transports, we managed most of it in one day. We have some 70-80 book shelves so the task might seem monumental. We did it all quite systematically from the lamps down to the floor. The huge task was of course all the 11.000 books and documents that had to be moved before dusting the shelves. Four of us went to the new Hageby Centre for raggmunk as lunch (for an explanation, see April 6). I think I can say that we were all quite proud of our accomplishment by the end of the day. We proved that AFU is not just collection of dust! :-)  One of the first points on my list for the day was to move the contents of the three shelves where we have so far kept surplus books for sale over to our 'C' facility where we will now create sort of a 'sales department'.

Today I also credited the first part of the all the fine collection brought from the UK by Clas and Håkan E. See the Recent donations page for that. Clas Svahn reports, on his blog, that today he met Nils Dellgren who was an attaché for the Swedish Defence in Washington, in the 1950s, and got hold of the MERINT placard found on the bridges of every US navy ship at the time, according to which UFOs should always be reported. The MERINT original will soon pride one of the AFU walls.

May 24 In between working hours I took my lunch box on my bike up to AFU. Spent some time with the work force, then started preparations for tomorrow's 'clean up day'. Removed unnecessary objects from the floors and carried a number of empty cardboard boxes to the recycling room. Took two small book shelves on our cart over to the 'sorting facility' where I found a very appropriate place for them. 'Another brick in the wall'. Also brought the videos donated by Odd-Gunnar Roed, via Ole Jonny Braenne, to the video collection archive. This was a second box that had arrived last week from Ole Jonny. In the evening I made a false start of the clean-up day by spending 3+ hours dusting and water sweeping the floors of the work facility and cleaning the toilet. I even bought a new small carpet for the toilet downtown. Some old dirty spots on the floors wiped out forever! Some yet remaining. Anyway, it all felt a lot fresher as I left. Now we can maybe concentrate on the library facility tomorrow!??
May 22-23 I was first a bit unwilling to spend two full days at our summer house but fiancée knows my best, as always. We had a nice, quiet and restful Whitsun holiday in the house. Lots of time for reading the 19 new issues of The Star Beacon that was included in the box from Rod Dyke (collected yesterday), and the five issues of UFONews UK, which I recently bought from it's editor Steve Gerrard in Southampton. Both are very informative, yet hugely different in their scope!! I like the Beacon, it is a worthy follower of Aileen Edwards old The Missing Link. Nicely edited with fine color fantasies of saucers and the usual mix up of abductions, channeling, book reviews and interesting (from a folklore viewpoint) (channeled) comments on questions sent in by the Beacon readers. The magazine gives you a lot of ideas about what bounces around in the minds of contemporary American new-age ufologists!!

On the Sunday Clas phoned that he had collected yet five banana boxes full of materials donated by one-time UFO-Sweden co-worker Roger Ersson which Clas would bring to our sorting facility on his way back from the Kalmar conference. Now the 'sorting facility' is completely crammed with new collections to sort and to catalogue!!!! Will keep us on toes throughout the summer. The Kalmar conference was a success despite low attendance (hot summer day + hockey games on TV, so...). In his talk, Clas disclosed the very latest cases he just had released from Swedish Defence, including a case of a 1949 ghost rocket that seemingly crashed up north. We Scandinavians so much wonder about the ghost rockets, especially why they are almost never spotted outside of Scandinavia! Why???

May 21 Worked just about one hour in the morning, then biked to AFU where I spent four hours. Clas came by car from Stockholm, en route to the annual UFO-Sweden conference, this year taking place in the town of Kalmar on the south-east coast. Clas had loaded his red Toyota with parts of the collections he and Håkan E had brought from the UK a couple of weeks ago. We were seven or eight people who unloaded the UK materials, so, despite the many hundreds of kilos, it only took us minutes! The usual effectiveness when Clas is around. Clas, Håkan B and me then unpacked the material onto our shelves in rough heaps by its donors: Hilary Evans, Peter Rogerson, John Harney, John Rimmer, BUFORA, John Hanson, Contact International, and so on. Clas also brought the contents of one of the latest boxes from Mikhail in St. Petersburg. Clas is like a gale force when he comes around. You just have to sit down and catch your breathe when he is gone. In the afternoon I sorted the Rogerson book collection that includes some extremely rare titles, and also the magazines donated by Evans, also with some very rare items.

Then I went home to fetch a box of materials that had arrived from Rod Dyke in Seattle. An extremely valuable collection of cryptozoological magazines to complete the excellent donations we've received a couple of years ago from Janet and Colin Bord. Fiancée and me then went to our summer house in the evening but on the way out we collected yet another (!) box of material from Ole Jonny Braenne at the main post office. In the box: mostly VHS videos that Ole Jonny now probably has transferred to DVDs and 'dumped' on us. Well, we are literally swamped with materials right now!

May 18-20 Three days sadly forgotten at work, sitting 'in' the phone answering queries about our bonus system. Despite careful efforts there are always mistakes and a few customers who do not receive the bonuses we have promised. Very nice to talk to (mostly) elderly people who have so many things to tell about their life and our old houses when they were younger... Some of the lonely ones can go on talking forever. Finally I have to tell them I have some work to do...
May 17 Back at work talking to tenants over the phone and raising rents (student rents this time). Talked to Clas several times during the day, he had fetched a file folder with copies of newly disclosed (formerly secret) government UFO-related documents and will talk about the new find before the annual UFO conference in Kalmar on Saturday. Lunch with fiancée at the community library then off to the masseur for a needed workout on my back and neck. I felt like a dough in the hands of a baker. A good feeling in the neck for a few hours but now in the evening some pain is back again.
May 16 Went to the summer house with fiancée for a few hours. Moved the lawn, then back to the city where we bought two pizzas, not the tastiest in the world, still some food. Spent the evening with updates of the real estates database I maintain.
May 15 Two hours at work doing a repetition of the invoice file. Then home and started some work on my real estates database, which was great fun. AFU sometimes just is too much and I need to do something completely different.
May 14 Worked the day and just got home when the postal distribution center phoned from Stockholm concerning a problem with our 11.000 invoices. I will have to go to work again tomorrow and do a repeat of it all. Could have used the time on other things... Anyway, I did a few updates this evening: see Recent donations and Recent acquisitions. Think I could use another two-three days reporting on similar additions on this site but it won't happen with a work that takes so much energy from me. Before going to bed I had two emails from Mikhail in St. Petersburg and Ole Jonny in Oslo. Three new packages coming in, including rare Soviet samizdat manuscripts and VHS films from Norway.
May 13 A rainy day spent mostly in front of the PC. Today's big AFU project (7-8 hours) was the scanning of 21 newspaper articles which had arrived during the past two months, since the change of broadband & computer. I finally managed to do the scans after working on a side track due to a bad 'quick start guide' for the CanoScan 8800F scanner. I bought and downloaded a program for 80 US dollars. Eventually, I discovered I had no need at all for that program since I already had what was needed. Hope I can get the 80 bucks refunded from the US. The new scanner produces much bigger PDF files than my previous one, and I thought this would create a problem since Yahoogroups has not accepted files of more than about 0,7 kb. However, after test mails I now discover this upper limit has been raised to at least 2-3 Mb. Thanks for that!

May 12 Just half-a-day at work because tomorrow it's Ascension Day, and also because the IT guys needed the afternoon on their own for a major job on our servers. Håkan B and me met Lisbeth Kylén for a farewell lunch. She will move to Karlstad and a new job. Lisbeth has been extremely helpful with placing work-trainees with AFU throughout a number of years, and with advice about the strange world of out-of-work jobs (!). She will now become a saleswoman for the services of ArbetslivsResurs in the west of Sweden.

Spent 6-7 hours in the afternoon/evening on AFU paperwork: emptying email box, answering emails, invoices, also updated Recent donations with yet another entry. A Frenchman from Grenoble has contacted us with exchange suggestions. I spent several hours checking his list against our holdings. I even biked to the library to check out the SCEAU collection not yet catalogued by Ingrid. Remains about 25 books and a number of magazines which we would be interested in. Also produced a list of 560 UFO cases from the Kalmar county in east Sweden where UFO-Sweden will have it's traditional national conference in just a few weeks. In the evening and early night there was the first thunder-storm this year.

May 11 Written 11.000 invoices at work, and then four invoices at home, the latter to UFO-Sweden and ArbetslivsResurs (for periods of work training with AFU). Also managed to update Recent donations with a note on a box of British magazines that I fetched tonight from David Norman.
May 10 Went to AFU during lunch and also later in the evening. Sven-Olov, Susanne, Håkan L, Elisabeth, Yvonne, Ingrid and Benny all there. After work I emptied the post box in Hageby and went to 'the AFU street', specifically to the library facility where Håkan B had put together another Billy shelf. We discussed various ideas on increasing the shelf capacity of the library. Then home to pay the 3700 SEK invoice from Schenker's for the Schönherr import - well worth the money!

Clas has posted breathtaking, detailed reports on his ten day UK tour on his Swedish blog. For the benefit of international readers, here's a résumé of the people and places Clas and Håkan E visited last week, and, (in brackets) some examples of collections made available to AFU: April 29: Ferry Gothenburg-Fredrikshavn, then car across Denmark to Esbjerg, ferry to the UK. April 30: Immingham to London by car to Hilary Evans (donated another big batch of materials), where night spent. May 1: visits to John Rimmer (magazines, tapes) and Judith Jafaar & Robert Rosamund (BUFORA mags collection donated to AFU), night spent. May 2: car to Rickmansworth to visit Edwin Joyce (discussions on scanning FSR archives, five boxes of materials), same day to Birmingham to visit John & Dawn Hanson (clippings, magazines, ufo reports, more to come next year), night there. May 3: car to Bristol area to see Robert Moore (magazines donated which he has already scanned), then via Glastonbury and Stonehenge and back to Hilary Evans where stayed the night. May 4: car to Bristol to visit Denis Plunkett (BFSB fame) and then to Manchester to Peter Rogerson (200 books donated), and then Philip Creighton, also Manchester, where night spent. May 5: Talks with Philip Creighton (magazines) and then on to Philip Mantle & wife in Pontefract (boxes of magazines, some 70 audio tapes). May 6: car to Oxford to see Frances Copeland and Geoff Ambler (Contact board members, 11 boxes for scanning, clipping collection, more next year), then back to London and Lionel Beer (return of pictures and scanned since last UK tour, new materials picked up for scanning), spent night again with Hilary Evans. May 7: Packing of all material, during discussions with Hilary Evans promises that AFU will receive his complete collection in the future. In the evening ferry back to Sweden. Now you can breathe again!!

May 9 After breakfast and shower (in that order, hmm, unusual...) I was ready to go to AFU to help Håkan B welcome today's guests from the Skaraborg UFO society. While I was packing some books & mags for the archives, Clas phoned with a report on what had happened in the UK the previous week. Looks like the future of the AFU idea looks brighter than ever. Clas' Toyota was downloaded on the North Sea ferry to Denmark and they had gotten numerous promises of future collections. As donations, or as loans for digitizing. I am stealing a photo of Clas and Håkan E, and all the material they brought home, from Clas' blog (left):

While at it I will steal yet another photo from Håkan B's blog (right) with the Skaraborg UFO society assembled outside the archives. We welcomed Tage and Christina Bång and eight other members of the Skaraborg UFO society with coffee, bread & cookies. Tage is selling off his taxi business to become a pensioner - and hopefully find more time for local UFO investigations. Håkan and I split the group in two halves and took different routes between our facilities with them. As with most visitors we got the impression that they were very impressed with AFU's current work which was also documented by entries written in our guest book. After the tour we all went for a nice two hour meal at a downtown Chinese restaurant.

May 8 After shower and breakfast I walked in the rain to work and spent six hours computing this year's bonuses for the tenants. There's even a small sum in it for me since I have lived for more than 35 years in flats owned by the company. In between the computations I wrote a documentation on the new routine which seems to have worked much better than the old one. The old took me three work days of boring controls, the new one just one day.
May 7 Left work slightly after 15.00 hours and went straight home. Chilly weather so I just bought a couple of coffee buns - saltängsbullar - on the way home and consumed them in front of the telly. The remainder of the evening was spent doing almost nothing - I think.
May 6 During lunch hours I brought my large 'heavy-load' briefcase to the archives, crammed & heavy with new magazines I had catalogued at home yesterday. The large briefcase is becoming worn after carrying tons of books, mags and binders throughout the years!! Håkan L, Sven Olov, Elisabeth, Sandra and Susanne was today's AFU team. We booked May 25 as a 'general clean-up day', at least for the work facility and the library. Lots of dust and unspeakable things in the corners... During lunch that day we will all walk to the community library for raggmunk (see April 6, below) paid for by the Public Employment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen).

While at AFU, today, I had a phone call from Schenker's who had gotten the invoice for the Innsbruck-Norrköping shipment returned. Of course they had used our street address, where there's no mailbox, despite that I had pointed out that this wouldn't work. Also received SMS messages from Clas in London and phoned him after trying - & failing - to text a reply. Clas & Håkan E has received so many donations for AFU during their UK tour that he is now packing boxes at the Hilary Evans home that we will later order to be shipped to Sweden by lorry. After work I went to the grocery store to fetch a parcel of Polish magazines & books I had ordered through eBay.

May 5 I am a customer at the Clas Olsson store almost every day. Today I bought ten screw nuts to repair the little yellow cart we have at the archives for transports between our different facilities. The cart regularly falls apart due to the rough gravel on the pavements during winters. After a successful repair I biked to the post box in Hageby to see if there was an invoice from Schenker's for the shipment from Austria? There wasn't - yet. But the box had a number of magazines including UFO Encounter from Australia and UFO Newsclipping Service.
May 4 In the morning I went to the post office and sent a registered envelope with some money to our Austrian donor to meet costs for boxes, tapes and other things. I also fetched a German book bought on eBay for AFU. During lunch I met Håkan B at the community library restaurant and we discussed some urgent AFU matters. At work I created a brand new file to include the 'value year' for each one of our circa 750 buildings. Seeing how this 'value year', which is supposed to represent the relative tax value of each building, works, one can easily loose any confidence in official tax systems. No reason at all behind the appointed 'value years' - seems like lottery. After work I went to the Clas Olsson store and bought a USB hub for our internet-connected PC, which we need to connect to a number of scanners & hard disks, eventually. Then I biked up to AFU to re-assemble, the work table I had moved from the 'A' to the 'C' facility last week. Some work even this day for my tiny muscles!! In the evening I posted a credit note concerning a book received from New Zealand, on Recent donations.
May 3 Biked to AFU during the lunch hours and met everyone (almost). Benny was faithfully there with a new batch of audio files to unload onto our hard disk drive. Ingrid had a problem with cataloguing a Erich von Däniken title in English that had no reference to the name of the German original, but she finally found the info on the internet. Sven-Olov and I discussed a recent case of harassment against the AFU foundation & personnel from a former 'employee' whom we had to 'expel' a couple of years ago. A rare problem, luckily. Decision was to take no action at the moment. While eating my lunch box Clas phoned from London reporting that his & Håkan Ekstrand's UK tour had been extremely successful so far. The car was already almost filled to its brims. We discussed finding more 'Phase 3' people, computers and scanners to be able to scan materials that would now be lent from the UK.
May 2 I was almost woken up by an early morning call from Sven Andersson, our faithful contributor of UFO materials from his collection in Falköping. He had just celebrated 73 years, the other day, and carefully reminded me that I had forgotten. If anything, I am lousy at remembering birthdays, probably because I don't see the significance in them. We all know we are heading for one point in the future, so why focus on that... Fiancée and sister went to the summer house while I stayed at home to catch up with AFU matters and paperwork. With two jobs which both could be full time, there is hardly any time for leisure left!
May 1 The First of May and we went to Örebro for a very short visit with fiancée's mother and then we spent a nice afternoon with the family of one of fiancée's old school friends. Their son became 20 years of age, the young boy, and we celebrated him. We saw exhibits of his photography work - he is destined for that profession!
April 30 After three hours at work I spent a couple of hours at AFU cataloguing recent exchange magazines that were returned from Stefan Roslund, in Clas Svahn's recent delivery (April 26). All magazines sent to AFU are used by Stefan for comments in his international "Outlook" column in UFO-Sweden's UFO-Aktuellt. As they are returned I try to catch them for the cataloguing process, before Sven Olov puts his hand on them, sorting them into our magazine files by country and title. I then went home and helped fiancée to carry carpets for washing at the special carpet laundry we have in a nearby house.
April 29 Waited several hours in the morning, at the archives, for the Schenker delivery of the Schönherr collection. During the wait I catalogued a big heap of more than one hundred issues of UFO - Revista Brasilieira de Ufologia, published by CPBPV and A.G. Gevaerd from Campo Grande in Brazil. More on the gifts from Mr. Gevaerd on Recent donations!

The Schenker truck arrived by noon. Elisabeth, Susanne and Håkan L helped me unload the 17 heavy boxes of books & other things from the two pallets outside our "C" facility. I left the boxes unopened - despite the curiosity inside of me - and went downtown for a couple of hours work. Me and Håkan B spent four hours of the evening unpacking the heavy boxes. More details on the Schönherr collection - see Recent donations!

April 28 Moved everything that Clas brought here yesterday to the other side of the shelves in the "C" facility. This just to empty as much space as possible for the upcoming deliveries to AFU. In the evening I printed the bank statement of Bruno Mancusi's latest 1200 SEK contribution to AFU. How very nice to have one of our most faithful contributors down in Switzerland! Thank you!
April 27 How little we know!! I am frustrated by the expanding gap between the wealth of material that flows into AFU archives almost daily and how little time I and my colleagues have available to digest it all. Anyway, I guess this is a universal problem for us 'archivists', whether we are full-blood professionals or 'semi-serious' activists.
April 26 I took the morning hours off from work to go to AFU. Met everyone to check up on the status of our work. The combined entrance-hall/coffee-room was crammed with people. Sven Olov got 200 SEK from me to pay for the shipping to Austria of the copies of a couple of unique books that we have made for a client. I met Ingrid in the library, she was working on cataloguing the Anders Berglund gifts from last week. Then I moved one of the new shelves into position to create more shelf space in the D (Design & Propulsion) and F (Forteana) sections. Benny arrived with another batch of digitized audio files to be backup-ed on our hard disk.

Almost one hour belated by road blocks in the Stockholm area, Clas Svahn arrived to unload a large batch of UFO materials, including a large number of new condition books, bought for a few dollars each from Bob Girard's Arcturus Books; the library of the Enköping UFO Society, which has been donated to us; and a new scanner eagerly awaited by Susanne for her scanning project. In the picture below (left-to-right): Håkan Blomqvist holding an example of illustrations from the GICOFF collection, Clas Svahn with a number of SF-UFO cartoon magazines he bought on Tradera, the Swedish eBay; and, to the right, Benny Dahl, our specialist in audio tape digitizing.

I had a phone call from Schenkers. The Schönherr collection has arrived at Malmö in the south of Sweden so it's only a couple of days before we have it here! I shall have to hurry up to empty the sorting shelves from what Clas has just brought here, to be able to concentrate on the Austrian collection for one-two weeks, before we have Clas and Håkan Ekstrand arriving back from their UK tour - probably with another downloaded Toyota. Everything seems stream-lined this spring!

April 25 Fiancée, sister and me went by car to Eskilstuna to visit Thomas, my sister's son. My sister brought a lot of stuff for Thomas's household and we celebrated the 15th birthday (moped age!) of his oldest son Pontus. We were back at 18.00 hours and I spent a few hours sorting out AFU paperwork and paying bills.
April 24 Fiancé helped me move my new office chair to AFU. I will continue using my old chair for a couple of weeks, until we can put a new order to IKEA. The chair is much more needed by the people at AFU.

This afternoon I have spent four hours at the archives. First, I dismounted our big working desk in the "A" facility and moved it over to the "C" (...quite some work for my biceps & back, but I did it!). Then I tidied up the floor slightly (hmm, more of that needed!) and started to assemble the two new IKEA office desks. In the process one of the metal structures for the underside of one desk fell right over one of my fingers. I roared out from the pain. The nail and top of the finger is now blue and aching. After regaining from the pain (I had to consol myself with a good cup of coffee), I finished the desks. As a last step I moved a sorting table over to the "C" facility. Despite the aching finger, I was satisfied with the result as can be seen on this picture.

April 23 Anders Berglund drove home after his three-day stay with us. He had stayed for the nights with the low-cost youth hostel we are lucky to have just a few hundred meters from 'the archives street'. At home, I had a confirming mail from Martin Schönherr in Innbruck that Schenker's had just picked up his father's UFO collection of 17 boxes on two Euro pallets and that it's now on its way by lorry to AFU. I also had a few research requests that can be fulfilled: an Austrian researcher sent us 50 Euros to buy photo copies of some very rare Australian documents he has been searching for (for years) and I could also confirm that we can probably help a Dutch researcher with copies of a Fortean magazine that arrived from Janet & Colin Bord a couple of years ago. This is what AFU boils down to in the end! On the other hand, some requests we have to deny, recently, because they involve too much work, or would probably destroy some item in our collection if we tried to make copies or scans. One such was the request for copies of a unique South American 500+ pages book.
April 22 After an intense day at work I went to AFU to meet Anders Berglund, Håkan Blomqvist and Tobias Lindgren who were socializing at the archives. I had brought a bag of sweet buns which we all enjoyed with the coffee. While the others reminisced about Swedish UFO history, and tossed ideas between them, I sorted out a couple of hundred audio tapes which have recently arrived and should be "milled" into our system. The tapes are mostly from Clas Svahn (his continuing witness interviews), Karl-Olov Pettersson (mostly on matters connected to UFO-Sweden's history) and from the American Bill Caulfield collection such as old contactee talks and presentations. I hope someone in our work force now can take on the project to register the tapes in our database.
April 21 Another day at AFU with a full program for the day. In the morning I tidied up a little in the empty old "C" facility and moved a big sorting table over from the "B" library. We are now fully prepared for the new collections arriving this spring. Then Benny came over from Ljungsbro with 5-6 DVDs and three USB sticks crammed with his work during the past months. No less than 42 Gb of digitized audio files, mostly witness interviews. We stored the files on our present "mother" computor, eventually to be transfered to a new one Tb hard disc drive. We discovered that the new PC has but three USB ports so I will have to invest in a USB fork. Benny has done an excellent job, with a lot of personal initiatives from his side, such as scanning (more or less) unreadable tape labels to include with the audio files in the folders he create.

I had just fetched the lunch pizza and an empty new cartoon from the local post office for a parcel to be sent to Mikhail in St. Petersburg, when I found Anders Berglund had arrived at archives HQs. Anders is a new, local field investigator for UFO-Sweden in the Dalecarlia province, which according to my statistics project from the 1980s was, and probably is, one of the most UFO-ridden areas in Sweden. Anders will be at AFU for three days to pick out a set of local cases (he also has a summer cottage in the Västerbotten province). I tried my best to guide him into the search through our database and the report files. The final point of the day was to pack the parcel of second-hand exchange publications for Mikhail in Russia. This time he will receive about 10 kilos of old International UFO Reporters, Skeptical Inquirer's and UFO Report's. I brought the parcel to the post office (read: grocery store) and hurried home to fetch another parcel from another post/grocery - my new Canoscan scanner.

April 20 Finally, the proposed shipping cost Innsbruck - Norrköping arrived in an e-mail from Schenker's. Seemed reasonable to our funds so we will go for it.
April 19 A busy day at work - not much time for AFU matters. Yet, I signed the contract for another facility - the sixth in row, along the Ljuragatan street (isn't that fantastic?) - this time on behalf of UFO-Sweden who will move their store of old printed magazine issues here. AFU will order a full set of IKEA shelves in May, so that the mags store is ready for move in during early June, when UFO-Sweden has to let go of the present store in Enköping. The rents for the new facility will be billed, second-hand, to UFO-Sweden.
April 18 Four hours at AFU this afternoon, after a good night's sleep, finishing off yesterday's five Ivar shelf sections at the "C" archive. Then put up yet another Ivar section in the kitchen of the "A" facility and installed Microsoft Professional in the new Packard Bell PC. Tried to install, also, the new hard drive but discovered there were no more USB ports. Hmmm. Discovered a white-on-black theme in the new Windows 7, - very nice for my aging eye, that, otherwise, tend to get over-stimulated by all the white flashing out of the screen. After a few hours in front of a wide white screen it's like having looked straight into a headlight, or the sun, for hours. Tried the same background on my home PC and it worked fine - except for when using Frontpage, where all the texts disappeared and the screen went blank except for illustrations! Well, I can change theme whenever I need to use Frontpage! Still, I am a little disappointed by the bleak look of Windows 7 screens.

Next part-project in the seemingly never-ending "New PC" scheme is the move of scanning & photoshop functions. Photoshop Elements to be installed (do I have a disc..?) as a first step. My old scanner will be dumped on the archives (wonder if it will ever be used again...?). Tonight's pensum is to order a good scanner over the internet. By the way, I am still to decide if to continue to use the bleak Windows Live Mail, or jump to Outlook 2007. I would like to compare the screens of both, before taking the decision.

April 17 Put up five of the tall Ivar shelf sections we had exchanged last night at the local IKEA, at the "C" archives facility. It will soon be serving as the sorting center for the incoming collections from Austria and the UK. Shelves all up to the ceiling in a very effective way. Just wished I had ordered the correct height for all the new shelves from the very beginning! I also trollied two new work-desks over to the "A" facility, and two Billy bookshelves to the "B" facility, to be built and raised later on.
April 16 The invoices are out with some questions asked by tenants over the phone, but it seems we are now in balance with all the changes (and some bad mistakes!) from last month. The Schoenherr collection from Austria is seemingly now in our hands after Schenker sent us a reasonable proposal, the shipping from Austria will cost us about 3.000 SEK.

After work: Fiancé and me went to IKEA (Linköping) in our Toyota Yaris Verso - that fantastic car. Kudos to Mr. Toyoda - we think you should continue producing that semi-ugly "box car". We "rebuilt" the inside of the car and managed to carry ten 222 cm long side units for the Ivar shelf system on our back leg from Linköping, having changed them from the shorter 179 cm heights I had ordered by mistake. The hot dog (just 5 SEK!) outside the IKEA cashier tasted like heaven!

April 15 Installed the new Office Professional 2007 program in my new PC. 5.800 SEK is a hefty price for a group of programs like this, but the bad alternative (for us who are used to working with Microsoft products, for hours, every day) is to learn new and unknown Open Office programs with different ways of doing things. Í downloaded, for instance, MySQL, but couldn't come to grips with how to start with it. It would probably take me months of time - time I'd like to use, instead, on developing AFU.
April 12-14 Release Wednesday afternoon of 11.000 invoices and 5.500 preliminary statements on our bonuses for long-term tenants. I have worked very concentrated on this for the past three days & evenings.
April 11 A few hours in the afternoon at the summer house. Tons of leafs to rake and put in plastic bags! Started off on that project, but soon grew tired and went to bed sleeping for three hours in the country air. I needed that! "The nature" is very irrational, flowering and withering every year. I have a hard time trying to accept that process, and, particularly, becoming a part in the process! Prefer to spend my time on more rational projects, thank you!
April 10 Three hours at work, computing refunds to 630 cable broadband customers, stricken by the earlier-than-announced cutting of their broadband-via-television cables. On the positive side, I am one of the 630 so I will get a refund on the monthly bill for our apartment. Generally, it seems to me that I have spent way too much time at work these pasts months... I really long for a complete week away from work, possibly also away from AFU - my second workplace. A few days with long mornings in bed and a good book would do me good!

Clas Svahn phoned several times from the ongoing UFO-Sweden board meeting. It was decided by the UFO-Sweden board that AFU will rent yet another facility - the sixth in the Ljura residential area! - where UFO-Sweden can keep their huge store of back numbers of their magazines. The move from the present storage in Enköping will take place in June. Hope it doesn't involve too much work for us.

April 7-9 Three very intense days at work; designing a new and better routine, with less tiresome manual control work involved, for computing our company's annual bonuses to long-term tenants. The previous routine - used for ten years - has proven unreliable and involved several hours of detailed controls. As I started the work, Wednesday morning, I was worried about how to come to a result in only the three days that were available. The bonuses had to be ready this week. Locking myself into my room I was very satisfied, Friday lunch, when I came out of the crypt and had constructed and tested a much more reliable, up-to-date and quick process for the work. This will save us several days each year and is a part-time ticket to my days as a pensioner. A concentrated effort to solve a problem.

Late on Friday evening I had an email from Martin Schönherr in Innsbruck, who had finally packed his father's UFO research collection in 17 big moving boxes, ready for the lorry transport to Sweden. On the previous day (Thursday) I had a phone call from the regional office of Schenker's, who, with a big push from Martin, will give us a price for carrying the collection to AFU. Here is Martin's picture of the boxes:

April 6 Another day at AFU. I trollied the parts of one of the new Billy shelves from the almost-empty AFU storage, over to the AFU library for Håkan to build later in the evening. I then went to the community library café and restaurant for my weekly portion of raggmunk, the Swedish potato pan cakes. The dish is the official favorite dish of this region of Sweden. Served with lingonberries and pork.

Then back to AFU and trying to get to grips with 'the Microsoft problem' - how to be able to use Microsoft programs (Word, Excel and - above all - Access for our databases), at the archives, without paying a fortune with each new computer that we buy into the AFU system. Short 60 days trial periods only solve the problems temporarily. Finally, I decided I had to buy a complete Office Professional (which includes Access) license, with disks, to continue our work without learning everything from point zero, again. 'Free' systems like MySQL or Open Office provide no solution for us who have grown accustomed to the MS world, at our work places particularly. In the evening I ordered a copy of MS Office Professional which is now on it's way. I need at home & I need it at AFU.

April 5 At work five hours to start computations of this year's bonuses for the tenants who have been on our roster for more than ten years. The bonus system will keep me busy for a few days this coming week. As I got home I installed Frontpage in the new PC, read back the backup from the web hotel server, and started this round of updates for the past week.
April 3-4 We went by car to Örebro, slightly more than 110 kilometers to the NW, to visit fiancés mother for the Easter holiday. While the snow has mostly melted away around Norrköping, there were many more white fields and woods close to Örebro. And large flocks of cranes in the fields, probably down for a 'coffee break' on their journey to northern Scandinavia.
April 2 Spent most of the day at work trying to get to some final grips with the figures in the metering system.
April 1 April fool's day. I used the evening trying to install my old Mustek scanner on the new PC. The installation disks would not auto run (Windows 7's fault?) & I couldn't locate the drivers on the disks I had saved, so I tried to download a driver from the Mustek homepage over in far-away Taiwan. That proved impossible, probably because that server worked on extreme slow speed. After half-an-hour the download had timed out. In the waiting process I read old 'expert reviews' of my scanner model that emphasized what I have experienced while working with it: old technology, not very good functions. So I made up my mind to also buy a new scanner! Anyone who thinks this will be the final expense for my computer change? I don't...
March 29-31 It took me three evenings - after regular work - before I finally was on line with my e-mail account. It was only after I had decided to let go of Bredbandsbolaget and concentrate on my old Telia email address. Problems then dissolved. The Telia support was immensely helpful. Kudos to them - and not the best of feedback to Bredbandsbolaget's support... The PC repair shop right across the street - very helpful - installed a new card in my old PC on the Monday. The new card has no noisy fan, so, as a sidekick I got an almost silent "old-new" PC. On Wednesday evening I rearranged the complete configuration of two PCs on my desk for the transition period, before I will let the old one go. A lot of programs & routines & connections to transfer, but with an external hard disk (and just backups on the C disk in the PC), the transition will be faster.

Tuesday was another full day at AFU. Susanne and Benny helped the truck driver, his assistant and me with the unloading of the shelves and furniture from IKEA. Susanne and me put together one Verksam work-chair each. We are going to buy more of them! Elegant and nice to sit in. It is important that people who work for us have proper workplaces and a quality chair is the start! Håkan came in the evening and took some pictures for his blog, here, of a certain tired archives worker. He claims my eyes are shut but doesn't realize I am looking through the slits and can't allow much more light to hit my sensitive retina. Damned it, I don't like being photographed.

March 27-28 Me and fiancé spent this weekend with our computer troubles. On the Saturday we attempted to start our e-mails through the new provider. We failed, despite four calls to Bredbandsbolaget. Sunday morning I couldn't get my six year old PC working. After many angry moments I decided the trouble was with the video output card. Since I had long planned to buy a new PC this spring. and let the old one go to AFU, I decided it was now time to take the bull by the horns. In the afternoon we went to the local Media Markt and bought a new Packard Bell with a LG wide screen. While at the store we also bought a hard disk drive to use at AFU.
March 26 Kuehne & Nagel has refused shipping the new donation from Austria to Sweden but I will make another attempt with their Stockholm office. IKEA phoned to confirm their delivery of the new furniture to AFU next Tuesday. I will be in place the whole day to work with this. Håkan Blomqvist has been at AFU today and reports, with picture of the current work-force, on his Swedish blog here.

Hurrah, I have finally managed to change broadband provider. As usual it took 4-5 hours, several evenings, of terribly frustrating work with crazy codes and installation procedures run and re-run & heated phone calls. It seemed promising - at first - until I discovered the new provider had forgotten to include one of the two basic coding schemes for my new connection. Three rather heated calls to the service organization to try and clear up the matter. Bredbandsbolaget (or Telenor), the provider, has a lot to sharpen up on! As a measure of retrospective protest I include their name here without linking to them! Shame on them!

March 24-26 Three days of getting back on schedule with the mail box at (professional) work and trying to find out what kind of mistakes had been made in the first coding, almost ten years ago, of our system for heating measurement from flats. Found a lot of really lousy mistakes - damn it if only people cared for doing a good job from the very start! I hate it when people can't see the future consequences of dabbling with data in a careless way. The cheating consultants who worked for us for the big money should be nailed close to my work desk to see me sweat over their mistakes - and they should be forced to pay back what we paid them on their invoices!!
March 22-23 Two full days spent at the AFU archives. Monday, I met with Benny, our new coworker, who has made a flying start with digitizing our audio cassette collection - some 50 tapes in just two weeks! Fantastic job! We selected another 20-25 tapes and will meet again on March 30 for another exchange. We make a priority of witness interviews, which should become an important addition to Susanne's new work of scanning documents from the report archives. Susanne complained about the cheap 100-dollar scanner we have, a better one is on its way to us! In the end documents, audio files and digitized pictures should end up in the same archival folder to form a presentation of each case. Elisabeth continues to check up our database and finds many omissions and outright mistakes. Håkan continues on our clipping database and shifts to checking up files in the report archives against our clippings collection, to make better copies. Yvonne is a new coworker who will type in articles from magazines like Spacelink and Flying Saucers for our article database.

Tuesday, I concentrated on tidying up one of the shelves in the picture library room. A lot of old 'troubles' were sorted out and some trash (including a non-working printer) carried to the garbage room. Five-six meters of Danish reports were transferred to the emptied shelf space, now forming a 'united' Danish report archive, roughly sorted by year. More for Anci to set her beautiful teeth into! :-)

March 21 A Sunday spent on leisure time, much needed, and some AFU work. Went by bike, in the drizzling rain, to Hageby to empty the post box and buy a LAN cable for a new broadband connection at home. I will now go up to a full-speed 100 Mbit connection. Filled out an AFU order on the net to IKEA for new shelves and furniture. The batch will arrive by lorry March 30. Also sent an email to the Norrkoping office of Kuehne+Nagel to ask them for the prize of lorry transport of 300 kilos from Innsbruck in Austria to Norrköping. We are taking over the fine collection of Austrian ufologist Luis Schönherr, who died at the age of 83, on October 7, 2009. We will come back with more details on this!
March 17-20 Four days enveloped in work with the old Siemens OZW system for individual metering in one thousand of our flats, a system which is not so easy to tame and has long been disbanded by Siemens. I am the only one left to dig into it, now. The reduction factor for heating (when the flat is situated on the gable, directly on the ground or towards the north) had gone wild and resulted in suspected wrong bills to at least 40 tenants. A lot of digging to confirm this was the case. Correction to the tenants will follow next week.
March 15-16 Two days absorbed by the final hours of hard work (pains in neck and arms) before releasing this month's invoices (at work). The hard labor of this was more than balanced by a very nice thing happening to AFU: We were contacted by the son of a recently deceased Austrian UFO researcher with a proposition to take over his father's complete archives, about 15 meters (or 300+ kilos). A first for us in the German-speaking world! No doubt we will come back to this new project very soon.
March 14 Met Patrik and Carina at the archives in the afternoon and had a nice chat over the coffee table eating from the sweet cookies they brought with them. Patrik came to change books & videos that he regularly borrows from the AFU library. Very pleasant people! I will take them up on their (free-will) suggestion to come and help us clean up the archives one day this coming spring. We really need to get rid of a lot of dust rats! 
March 13 Worked from home on the server's at work. In the evening: one of the most important evenings in a Swedish year - we voted for who is to represent us in the Eurovision Song Contest. The winner, 18-year-young Anna Bergendahl no doubt will be a star. A Marilyn Monroe blonde with a very fantastic (and special) voice.
March 12 Completed the March 8 report (below) with a nice picture of Benny and Tobias in the AFU hallway/lunchroom. Also posted a belated report about another very important donation from 'the good old GICOFF gang' - see Recent donations (2009).
March 11 I walked down to the archives late in the evening to take measurements for possible new bookcases in the library. Believe it or not, I found fifteen (15!) possible places for new shelves that can possibly be crammed into the facility. Went home and started to write down a proposition that I will distribute to our board members soon. 
March 9 Went to the garage after work to fetch a batch of matters from the postal box that I had forgotten in the car, last Sunday. A number of magazines like the UFO Newsclipping Service, Fortean Times and Share International. And a nice book gift from Stefan Johansson: Paul A. LaViolette's Secrets of antigravity propulsion. Plus a number of invoices - of course.
March 8 Another day off from work (compensation for Saturday when I was at work). Went first to the bank to open a fund account for AFU where we can stack away money for future needs and hopefully have the money grow. Then walked to the archives where the entrance hall was full of people - we were nine counting me.

Benny was the new face in the crowd. He will start a digitizing project this week, working (at least in the beginning) from his home in Ljungsbro. Benny and me went to the D-archive to fetch a first batch of 23 audio interview cassettes. We then walked to the pizzeria for a nice lunch. Later, Tobias came by, 'after work', and the three of us did some planning of the project. Tobias had bought a USB cassette tape player and will help Benny (his brother in law) to get on foot with digitizing sound tracks. We also paid a visit to Ingrid in the library and inspected the old archives (now almost empty) that may become a future center for digitizing audio-visual materials and pictures. I but wonder where we are one year from now? Thrilling!!!

March 7 Me, fiancé and sister went to the local IKEA. Anyone who doesn't know what IKEA is? My mission was to search for good things to buy for the AFU archives. New work chairs is a major priority! The 2nd- or 3rd-hand worn-out office chairs we have are hopeless, except for maybe two or three. I bought a sample of the most expensive chair to test out myself. Work lamps is another priority - several work places lack the proper lighting - at least for my own eyes. Also bough a sample lamp for the AFU people to test.

I had a look at the new 40 cm Billy book case that might fill out a few empty spaces in the book library. I found a folding chair (made from wood) that would be excellent to have for extra seats when we are many people round the breakfast table.

March 1-6 Six days completely given away to my professional work. I am often irritated by the amount of time and energy I have to use up there; still it is also a very interesting and rewarding job... Very mixed up feelings here!

With some 'pushing' by Tobias I finally got to the project of starting up Benny on his job of digitizing audio cassettes. We have booked Monday as an introduction day for Benny, meeting the AFU staff, and with Tobias joining us in the afternoon. Almost daily I receive parcels of books & magazines bought on eBay for AFU. Checking up on eBay items is virtually the only project I have eye energy left for doing, in the evenings. One evening I spent, however, checking the IKEA web site, since fiancé & me are planning to go there tomorrow. I will reconnoiter for a 'big buy' from IKEA of shelves, furniture and office supplies to be sent to AFU by lorry - a project that seems finally feasible now when the big heaps of snow slowly melt away in front of our entrances. 

I have also completed our reply to a questionnaire sent by the National Archives, seeking information about digitizing projects among archive institutions. The Swedish government is formulating a national strategy for digitizing, electronic access and digital preservation and the National Archives collects info from the various local archives.

February 28 Sunday, and some feelings of remorse before the upcoming week. My planning at work, last Thursday, indicated I have roughly three weeks of work to perform during the two upcoming weeks. I spent four hours at AFU, first preparing 4-5 heaps of books for classification/cataloguing by Ingrid, also made a backup of the library database for PDF release on this site, soon. After coffee & cake, I spent a few hours tidying up one of our 'acquisition tables' from a number of troublesome 'old problems'. Created a few new folders for some of the materials. 
February 27 A lazy day on the sofa, very well-earned. Later in the day, I finalized the 2009 economy report to the Swedish Tax Agency. AFU, being a foundation, is exempted from income taxes and VAT, but we need to make an annual statement to keep them informed. Hurried off to the letter box and dropped the form with enclosures, with a big sigh! 
February 26 Another day intended for AFU work on 'compensation' time from my work. The winter is very tiresome, however, and I felt all washed out as I arrived at the archives, pushing my bike through the snow-drifts and mud. Seems we are loosing several hours each day to the winter and cold. I only managed a few hours at AFU, meeting a Canon salesman who will come back to give us some further information, and some idea of the costs, we hope, on Canon's system for document handling. We are looking for a good retrieval system for, primarily, our picture library. We had hoped that Håkan E and Clas would have brought UFO-Sweden's home-developed picture library system for us to see last Monday but as you can see, below, their tour to Norrköping had to be cancelled. Anyway, we need to turn every stone to find the most cost-effective system that fits our needs. In the noon I walked my bike home and spent several hours sleeping, resting my eyes from the white snowy winter. The whiteness wear out my retina.
February 23-25 Three 'heavy' work days at my (prof.) job with long evenings in front of the PC screen. On the Thursday all of us in the Administrative department had a fine joint lunch at the new Asken restaurant in the old Knäppingsborg centre - wonderfully renovated from being a tobacco industry one hundred years ago. Very far away from the impersonal huge shopping centers that now grow up like mushrooms around major cities! Recommended for every tourist to Norrköping!
February 22 I was at AFU throughout the day. Clas and Håkan E was to come in the afternoon with a carload of 4-5 second-hand book shelves for the library, and some archival materials, but Håkan had developed eye problems, so the tour had to be cancelled for some later day. I know something about eye troubles; the symptoms Håkan had developed suggested retinal detachment but was diagnosed as an hemorrhage in the eye. Hope it works out for him!

I had definite plans for what to do during the day but - as usual - I came away with completely other things done, not on my list! With united forces we refurnished the work area at the AFU center, to make better spaces for the ladies, Susanne (left) and Elisabeth (right).

In the afternoon I re-designed the Swedish clippings database somewhat by dividing it into two separate 'bases', one for dailies and another for weeklies and special publications. I also deleted hundreds of references that were . more or less - just question marks! Not useful data, so deleted. 

February 20-21 I have used Saturday & Sunday - while the heavy snow storm has kept many of us Swedes indoors - on preparing five years of AFU bookkeeping for auditing by Tobias. Sorted out unnecessary papers from the five folders, numbered each paper with a verification number and wrote comments of explanation. Discovered a few minor mistakes. On the Sunday evening, while watching the winter Olympics on TV, I had a nice Facebook chat with Cherie in Kansas City, the daughter of Bill Caulfield whose UFO collection we bought in 2008.
February 18-19 Another two days lost to oblivion - at work
February 17 Ahh! In the evening a big sigh after having FTP:d the final invoice file to the Swedish Post for distribution. 11.000 invoices every month that our customers expect to be correct down to every minute detail! Walked rather slowly home feeling good as I usually do when the big hump in our monthly agenda is finally behind me. Coming home, I had a letter from Benny who had been approved as AFUs fifth 'Phase 3' co-worker. I singed the papers and hurried away with them to the grocery store/post where I also collected a couple of eBay books from the US and the UK. One of the parcels was nearly impossible to open. Must give the seller a big ++++++ for the packaging!   
February 15-16 Another two days buried at work with the computer systems and SQL coding, shuffling about with data.
February 14 Went to work downtown and had a couple of work-fellows even on a Sunday! Annual reports and other special projects are like magnets this time of the year! Worked six-seven hours on designing new SQL code for direct import of data from our system for invoicing electricity, water and heating, which we have installed in about 1.000 of our flats.
February 13 In the noon we went by car to the summer cottage, 15 km out in the country. Me, fiancé and my sister. We hadn't seen the house for several months so we were very uncertain about the shape of it. Buried under a 50-60 cm cover of deep snow the lawn offered us half-an-hour of hard work digging a narrow path the 25-30 meters up to the house. Wisely I had done some stretching before starting this adventure. You can see me & my sister with our snow-shovels:

Well, the house was in fine shape and we had a nice coffee break with some leftover cookies from the bygone summer. After that I worked a few hours at the professional work - but on line from home.

In the evening me and fiancé went to Flygeln, the new concert hall in the industrial landscape where we and about one hundred other people listened to Ebba Forsberg & her five men orchestra, playing Leonard Cohen songs in Swedish translation. A very strong performance by everyone on the scene, but why so few in audience? Where were the other 500 who could also have enjoyed this show so immensely as we did?

February 11-12 Two days with very little time for AFU or anything else, except professional work.
February 10 Met Håkan B during a lunch at the library's restaurant. We discussed the future of AFU and the new horizons that have opened with the good monetary compensations for out-of-work 'Phase 3' project. There are many possibilities that open if one of us (me as a pensioner!) can work full time at AFU and manage the project in more detail.
February 8-9 Days spent completely on professional work - even during evenings, then from home. I am sure you wouldn't be interested in how I shuffle about with facts & figures! Received an email from the government's Pensions Agency in answer to my query. Going for pension at age 61 will make you a poor man, but what is poverty? Some lack of money can be weighed against owning your own time and being able to go directly for what comes into your mind without so many obstacles! 
February 7 Lazy in preparation for an upcoming week of hard work. 
February 6 Slept 'til ten, then spent several hours at one of the shopping malls to replenish on groceries with fiancé and sister. Coffee with my sister, tonight she will come to us to watch the first in the series of Eurovision Song Contest selections for a final Swedish ESC contribution for 2010. I guarantee - there is no people in Europe more crazy about the ESC (we still remember our first success with ABBA's Waterloo in 1974)...

Clas Svahn reports, with picture, on his UFO-Sweden blog here, that he has just fetched 13 kilos of Brazilian UFO magazines donated by A.G. Gevaerd, Brazil's most well known UFO activist. I remember we discussed this several years ago with Mr. Gevaerd. Clas finally finished the deal! Great addition to AFU's shelf of South American magazines.

February 5 Seven hours, a full workday, spent at AFU. No less than four (4!) new, prospective collaborators came to the archives today! Must be a record! Young Jenny and Alexander will both start work-training next week and we all had a good, calm chat with them around the breakfast table. Alexander is sure to stay with us for five weeks. Jenny is also seeking another work-training with a company with better chances of a salaried job in the future, so we understand if she would prefer that place, if offered. 

Tobias Lindgren, manager of UFO-Sweden's report centre, came with his relatives (father, sister and brother-in-law) to discuss Phase 3-engagement for the brother-in-law with AFU. If the Public Employment Service in our neighboring town of Linköping will allow it, we would like Benny, the brother-in-law, to work for us on digitizing audio tape cassettes. It will possibly be a combination of work at home and coming to AFU for exchange of work materials and taking part of the 'social environment'. Another possibility is daily commuting Linköping - Norrköping and arranging a workplace for Benny at one of our facilities.

I also managed to recruit Tobias as a temporary, retrospective auditor for AFU for the passed five year period, when we have not had the time for many administrative procedures due to moving about with our collections from facility to facility. We do have another person in line for becoming our future auditor, but I have hesitated to put five years of book-keeping under that man's eyes. Tobias has now a permanent job with the digital maps department of the LFV (the Swedish Board of Civil Aviation) and is looking for a flat close both to his work & AFU here in Norrköping. He will be elected as a member of the AFU board at our next board meeting, the first in five years (except for daily contacts on the internet and by phone), which we will be able to hold when the auditing is finished.

At the archives, during the day, we also discussed a future change of work assignments. I will plan that and make it a reality after the upcoming professional work-period for about a fortnight (when there will be very little time for AFU). Going home, I brought two heavy report files for 1977 in my bag, to continue my report archiving project. In the process of carrying that heavy load on my bike I had to jump across the HUGE heaps of snow, bike in hand, and hurt my back. I now have symptoms similar to sciatica.

February 4 Spent the evening with sorting & re-archiving the November and December 1978 reports in front of the TV. The three files finally became four file folders in the new format. More space needed! Some of the cases might have become interesting if investigated more properly, but this was a "down" period in Swedish ufology.
February 3 It has been snowing all night and continued throughout the day! Heard from the archives that Sven Olov's bus was cancelled and he couldn't get into town. Everyone at the company where I (and my fiancé) works went by bus & cars to the Bråvalla airfield, former base of the F13 wing of the Swedish Air Force. There we had the shortest kick-off in company history, just 2-3 hours, in the former officer's mess, and then the bus took us back with narrow margins on the roads. Nice food and strong wonderful coffee. After work I went by bus to the petrol station with our post office box and walked home several kilometers through the heaps of snow.
February 2 The problem at the archives have been sorted out. It seems - among other things - that I had mistook the number for our new archice cell/mobile phone - interchanged two digits. Damned! Sorting & archiving UFO reports for October 1978 took the whole evening in front of the telly. The late 1970s were not a good period for UFO investigations in Sweden, with a few exceptions. Very little good and detailed field work, most of the reports in the file are just simple newspaper clippings with very little evidence value. Demonstrates also  the change that took place a few years later, when UFO-Sweden was revitalized under new leadership in the early 1980s. On a similar note, colleague Håkan Blomqvist reports, on his blog, that he has just finished writing the new edition of UFO-Sweden's history. The organization will celebrate it's 40 years of existence at the annual national conference in Kalmar this spring.
February 1 No one at the archives in the afternoon when Lisbeth came with two new work-trainees. Work load prohibits me from going there myself. I just thought it would resolve if Sven Olov was contacted beforehand but seemingly no one answers the phone at the archives - or is it somehow disconnected?

After work I took the bike to the grocery store to fetch another second-hand eBay book authored by forteanist William Corliss, plus a heavy (10 kilo) package of UFO books from France, credited today on Recent donations. I also put up two other credit notes to fine collections from the UK & Russia - see Recent donations (click on Recent donations 2009, there).  

January 31 No AFU jobs today - worked seven hours with the database at my professional job.
January 29 and 30 Saturday and Sunday, when so called 'normal' people rest from their jobs. Ufologists sometimes don't. That's the free time we can use for what we would prefer to work with, if economically independent. And, if you are in my clothes, you still have to spend some weekends now and then at your regular job because six hours each day isn't enough to get all needed work done, at the peaks of the job curve. Usually these periods come in the winter, with concentrations in November, December and January.

But then again this allows for compensation hours and days later on at AFU. Anyway, two days lost into oblivion on feeding new parameters into a computer system that is ever so thirsty for details. Woke up Sunday morning with the obvious solution to a problem at work, I am impressed with how the brain can sort out things during sleep!!

Two evenings spent in front of the television, cutting out news articles on local buildings for my local historical collection on the community of Norrköping. You cannot put all your eggs in just one basket, can you? If there is one word that I like then its 'crop rotation' (växelbruk in Swedish). When tired, the easy work of managing your clipping collection relaxes and redirects your inner system.

January 28 Slept late; staggered into the shower at 8.30. After breakfast I got a call from AFU where one of the computers wouldn't start, the one with the Access database of Swedish ufo reports. I grasped the nettle (hmm, seemingly a translation of our Swedish 'took the bull by its horns'...) and walked through the heaps of new-fallen snow down to the archives. Plodding through the heaps of snow, sometimes half-a-meter high, keeps your body fit - that's the proper positive attitude! The report database simply wouldn't start up. Finally solved the strange problem (- the ET's are seldom supporting us at AFU, is that because we sometimes make fun of them or because we have forgotten to pump up the green plastic ET doll...? -) by creating a new database and importing the old one into the new. That did it and everything started up!

Plodded the snow down to my work in town and did some further problem solving. The walk through the white snow got me an headache coming from my overexposed eye, so I had to leave work one hour before my original intentions for the day. Friday-Saturday-Sunday I will be completely engulfed by my professional work, the project will probably make a big hole in time for AFU.

January 27 The annual rent increases have finally been negotiated and the result can now be updated to our the computer files, which will keep me occupied for a couple of weeks. A rather tedious job with thousands of small details that few can imagine. It is also a rather 'sadistic' work to, each year, raise the rents that 10.000 citizens of Norrköping will have to pay for their flats, knowing some of them are not the rich & wealthy.

In the morning, me & my fiancé went to the bank office to plan for the future and look after our future monetary situation. I signed for an endowment policy to help us keep our necks over the water after my planned pensioning 1,5 years from now. I am quite determined! 

An Irish researcher had booked for a visit at AFU tomorrow but emailed he had to postpone the trip from Stockholm until his next trip to Sweden in the spring. He's welcome anytime!

January 25 Temperature has not risen above zero degrees Celsius (Centigrade) for many weeks now, and the snow is mounting at cross-roads. Tomorrow more snow & storm is in line, says the meteorologist, so I took the opportunity to walk to the archives today, with my portion of wonderful raggmunk ('potato panncake') in the right hand. Everyone was there except Ingrid. Some problems with the NAD registration routine on the web. Otherwise we discussed politics, more specifically the moderate Swedish cabinet's policy of robbing the poor, the out-of-work & the sick to lower the taxes for the working people and the rich and famous. Where is Sweden and the famous "folkhem" (welfare state) heading? The crew wished for a daily newspaper subscription at the archives so that they can follow ads of upcoming jobs - without work you cannot afford a subscription. Reasonable, but then AFU also needs a letterbox! I wonder who might help us with putting one up on the concrete?
January 24 2-3 hours on AFU work in the evening, re-archiving the report archives for May-September 1978. All metal (paper-clips, staples) and plastic pockets removed and the material sorted carefully by date-and-time into acid-free day/date covers and the covers are filed in acid-free professional archival boxes. So far about 30-35 boxes have completed for the period 1979-1989 with work now continuing with 1978.
January 23 Updated Recent new books with a review of an excellent new local history that includes the written history of a well known Swedish UFO society.

'Bikewalked' (my new word for the combination of biking (when possible) and walking) to the archives for a few hours of logistic work moving papers and stacks of papers here and there. Then home to start - for real - the process of becoming a pensioner. Wrote emails to six institutions/companies where I have saved-up money for my older days, trying to put questions on how to get my money back when I now need them, in a couple of years. I am very determined now to make it all work. Fiancé and me will go to the bank on Wednesday for more planning. 

January 22 I should have gone to Örebro, early in the morning, to visit mother-in-law but felt nauseated and, as a safety precaution, her daughter (a.k.a. my fiancé) went alone. Sorry for her. For once, this guy had really looked forward to a car trip through the snowy Christmas-card-Sweden! But, with winter vomiting decease around I didn't dare, for my own sake as well as for the possibility of spreading a virus around me. Heard on the news that Swedish docs had located a new and even worse mutation of the WVD (that hit this household hard last week, see below). Look out, it's everywhere! The cleaning lady at work had to go home yesterday, with nausea. Wash your hands! When no one around seems to catch the swine flu it's easy to back down on safety precautions and other little fellows sneak in...

A brief report on current on-going AFU work: There are now 44 Swedish UFO groups represented on the National Archival Database, thanks to our co-worker Susanne, who has spent this week on NAD, and will continue. Elisabeth has taken over Susanne's previous job of checking the report archives against our database, and Håkan L is completing the report files before Elisabeth's check-up. Anci continues to re-archive the Danish report archive from SUFOI while Ingrid has gotten to the letter "P" while cataloguing the Perry Petrakis book collection. Sven Olov is still filing American magazines from the huge Bill Caulfield collection and checking the material against our existing (previous) collections, while Sandra continues to enter Swedish clippings in our database. Christer works from Malmö on translating materials from the 1946 ghost rocket wave. At least two other people (Clas and Karl-Arne) are doing scanning work of pictures and news clippings from their respective homes. Håkan B has a busy time writing the updated version of UFO-Sweden's history (before the 40th anniversary this coming spring) and he has a lot of new organizational archives on his desk to take care of. Myself (Anders) I am trying to figure out how we should develop AFU with new shelves, new workplaces, computers and a scanner. So much that needs planning! If I counted correctly we are presently no less than 12 people working every week, and some of us every day, to develop AFU. Cveta and Malin have ended their short terms at AFU, and we are awaiting possible new work trainees.

January 21 After work I went across the street and bought tickets for the Killer Queen concert in March and for Ebba Forsberg (singing Leonard Cohen materials) in February. In the mail I received another eBay item - The Mountain of Mist by Patrick Coulcher. An SF novel touching on UFOs. Before tucking in, I calculated what the cost would be for IKEA shelves for a new storage for UFO Sweden's (unsold) UFO-Aktuellt magazines - landed at 9.600 SEK for 56 meters of shelves.
January 20 Work day - concentrating almost exclusively on one project. Concentration gives calm and tranquility.

Took the bike to the post office (grocery store) to bring home another 9 kilo parcel of archival materials from France - see Recent donations for 2010 - a new page I opened today. I also brought home two British ufo-related books I had never heard of before, bought for AFU on eBay. Despite the opened new 2010 page there are still a couple of donations from 2009 to credit, so check that up, too.

January 19 A full day at work again - being physically there, even! Had to use most of the afternoon correcting an acute problem caused by someone (not me!) not doing his work. Tried to compensate for that by being even more service-minded and foresighted. Time will tell if it works out.

Walked (snows everyday, impossible to bike) to AFU after work, made some copies and then went over to inspect a possible new facility that we may hire to keep UFO-Sweden's stock of unsold magazines. UFO-Sweden has been ordered out of the club cottage and magazine store they now rent at Enköping. One alternative is to place the mag store in 'AFU custody'. Made measurements of the locality and will try some mathematics before I go to bed, to see if we can fit in 150 cartoons of magazines in a possible IKEA shelf system on 16 square meters without sending the UFO-Sweden guys on extreme slimming cures. Hmmm, I wonder...

January 18 A 'free' (vacation) day with AFU work, from early morning, till late evening. At least 10 hours on the AFU account! Spent most of the day at the archives, talking to and discussing our work and future plans with our new and old co-workers. A majority spoke for taking back our old archives into 'active duty' and setting up 2-3 new workplaces there. The advantage would be a more noiseless working environment than can be arranged on the possible remaining areas of our main (present working-) facility. We shall have to divide us into several groups but then again we can all meet for 11 o'clock breakfast together! So, it's now about saving up money for new-or-used desks, office chairs, shelves, computers and peripherals like scanner(s) and hard disc drives. The sky is the limit!

Spent 1.5 hours walking to the post box at the petrol station in the southern outskirts of Norrköping. Not very efficient use of time, but what to do when more and more of this western society is built around his Majesty The Holy Car, and you don't want to be a part of that world? As I passed through the snow-covered biking lane close to a school I was (again) flabbergasted by the young lazy 'motorist' generation who cannot park a car 200 meters away to walk to the gym for an hour of training? Instead they trespass on the biking lane and destroy it by skidding up snow with their 4-wheel SUVs. Completely crazy! Just think if a gang of bicyclists would invade the motorway in protest???

January 17 Slept til' ten, then the damned (sorry!) PC frightened me by refusing to start. After many attempts I did the classical one: disconnected every cable and let the computer rest for half-an-hour while having breakfast. That did it! I was elated, the thought of a restart procedure with loading up the whole system again made me nervous. Computers are like UFO phenomena, elusive and unpredictable. I shall have to realize my plan to buy a new PC this spring and 'dump' the old on AFU - as I usually do. There are two older generations still on duty at the archives. I believe the older of my AFU 'pensioners' is now "singing on the last verse", so...

Spent four afternoon hours at AFU sorting and carrying the remainder of yesterday's incoming 'goods' closer to where they will be archived, and cataloguing a batch of new magazines. AFU is more and more becoming a 'logistic' operation. Everything would be so much simpler if we had it all under one roof, instead of under four roofs.

January 16 Up early - too early - in the morning to be in position at 9 to take over new archival collections from Clas Svahn & colleagues, who were passing by, on their way to a UFO-Sweden board meeting down in the very south of Sweden. Then spent six hours at AFU doing the first rough sorting of probably a hundred kilos that came in... Very interesting stuff: like the original Imjärvi (Finnish humanoid case from 1970) file from the Gothenburg group GICOFF, the Gothenburg group that saw to that the case got world fame through articles in FSR. Thumbing through the file I decided to have another more careful reading of it, some time in the future. I saw & sensed that there were more info there than what has been published! Seemingly there were paraphysical dimensions to the case not covered in the published reports. Kudos to the old GICOFF gang who did a superb job of investigations from 1969 until the mid 1970s.

Did a write-up to credit a few of the other collections that came with Clas & his gang of followers. See more under the entries of gifts from Mikael Westersund, Carl-Anton Mattsson and Erland Sandqvist on Recent donations. Also a note to credit a gift subscription for an interesting magazine - we should do more of such credits for other mags we receive for free like UFO Newsclipping Service and Fortean Times!

January 15 A day lost to my professional work - working virtually from home - five hours. Interesting job for a systematic freak like me, but I could do the same kind of work at AFU. Considered myself in quarantine. No AFU time today.
January 14 Felt fine again after a final vomiting period at nine yesterday evening. A good nights sleep can do wonders! Back in business! I have been (virtually) at work all day, working from home. No deceases spread outside of the home environment. Hope I didn't cause any such trouble by being physically at work on Jan. 12. "Let's dance" contestant (and poet) Marcus Birro has also had the WVD yesterday, reports the media, so I have been in very good "company", and I don't have to make a dance performance on Friday!! Life is full of happy things - large and small. :-)

At AFU we welcome Elisabeth Booth (married to an Australian if you wonder about the un-Swedish surname) who started working for us today. My self-imposed quarantine (see below) forbids me from going to AFU HQ until perhaps Saturday morning when Clas and a gang of UFO-Sweden people will pass by for new archival deliveries.

A winter walk to the post office (in the grocery store) brought home a copy of Raechel's Eyes by Helen Littrell & Jean Bilodeaux. I have read some intriguing articles on the case in the MUFON UFO Journal (why don't we get that - despite repeated contacts with MUFON HQ? - is there an administration at that org?) so.. am a little curious. The previous owner from eBay seems to have tired at page 34-35. I doubt that my lone right eye will have the energy to read the whole book, despite my interest in abduction accounts. More interested in abductions than in 1950s contactee sagas, I must admit. Both are equally mysterious. In the 1950s it was mostly contactee men, in modern abductions it's mostly women. Why? 

January 13 WVD (winter vomiting decease) hit me 04.30 in the morning. Periods of vomiting but not as intense as it has been the previous two times I have had it. Spent the day in bed watching dumb sitcoms on TV, feeling nauseated, but still VERY happy NOT to be one of those trapped in the ruins on the island of Haiti. Despite its cruelty, the WVD is very, very far from that hell. One thought came to my mind: if I had been living in Haiti and the buildings had been falling around me, while having the WVD... Maybe there were several lonely souls in that pour position? News every day give you reasons for many kinds of paranoia.
January 12 Despite WVD viruses at home I went to work - just because I had to. Felt good to be away from the little invisible creatures invading every little corner... In the evening I had a few hours session working with the 1978 file of Swedish UFO reports. Managed to put some order to the January-March period.
January 11

This could have been a 'lost' day. I should have been at work, but my fiancé experienced - once again - the nasty winter vomiting decease. Feeling nauseated myself, in the morning, I was afraid I had caught it too, it's very contagious, but the day went by and I still feel like I am alive (- something you doubt very much when you are inside & experiencing the world of the WVD, that nasty little virus..).

More positively, AFU is now represented on the Swedish National Archives Database (NAD) with a first few of our several hundred archives from UFO groups, organizations and ufologists. (Just type the word 'UFO' in the search field and press "Sök"). In the coming months we will see to that ALL of our archives will be registered there! This is only just the archives indexes, of course! Like most archives we see no possibility (and cannot prioritize) digital scanning of all that we have, and receive - it would be a most bewildering task!

January 10 An evening walk to the archives through the glistening and snowy landscape can be nice experience! Compensates for the cold. I brought with me sixteen pages of new clippings that I had just scanned and sent out on our mailing-list, but also brought the new fire extinguisher, and a number of other items that had come in the mail, including a nice little slip from a guy in California who wants AFU to send him "information on UFOs". Well, we have a lot to choose between! :-)
January 9 I spent a few hours today searching eBay for interesting items. Found some, and plan some bidding, but the more original ones are often way to much for my cash. Maybe its time for AFU to put up a new series of sales to draw some more money from the second-hand magazine market? If I only had time!! Money from eBay sales would pay for the new shelves AFU does need at three of our facilities (our library, our work facility and our upcoming new work facility).

Anyway, today's investment was a small 2 kilo fire extinguisher for our work facility. I plan to buy another two or three extinguishers and also a number of fire blankets to keep for increased safety at our different facitilites.

January 8 I did a sum up of the contributions to AFU during the five years 2005-2009. It all adds up to at least 557.000 SEK, meaning our sponsors (more than 260 individuals & organizations!) have invested about 80.000 USD or 55.000 EUR in us during the period. Wow! 

Håkan spent the day in the AFU library putting more order into our huge collection of books, and creating more space for new titles. You can see new pictures and a report on his Swedish blog today.

January 7 I spent 2-3 hours this evening updating the list of money donated to the AFU foundation during the 2005-2009 period. The list is for our upcoming combined annual reports for those five years. So far I have listed more than 250 nice and intelligent people (mostly Swedes, so you other people have a lot to accomplish :-) ), in the list. Very generous people!

Sweden experiences weeks of extreme cold (more than -40 Centigrade in north Sweden), and daily snowfalls, so I have had to postpone both a trip to our post box and checking up on what is happening at AFU. It just isn't possible to use the bike, you have to rely on walking or buses/trams.

From Clas Svahn's Swedish blog it is apparent that he is probably the most active AFU coworker these days. He has spent several full days scanning photographic material for the AFU/UFO-Sweden picture library.

January 6 Among today's many small AFU-related occupations I scanned and mailed out twelve pages from recent Swedish clippings on our 'AFU-klipp' (AFU clippings) mailing-list on Yahoo. The service is free for the asking, just mail us and you'll get a service that would cost you the equivalent of 4.500 USD each year! But the articles are all in Swedish - of course. The scanning procedures takes me several hours each week, sometimes my PC crashes under the burden and has to be restarted. Not so this day, however. Hurray!
January 5 A new decade - literally a new age for AFU. The 2009 contract with the Swedish Public Employment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen) will give us completely new resources for developing AFU, both money-wise and through personnel that we can employ on relatively long term periods. We are starting to see the effects of this. Before Christmas I had the joy of buying the first new PC for our work, the first one financed without collecting the money from out of private citizens (taxed) pockets. Now the money comes from the tax money we all contribute to. See our new internet-connected computer on the Projects page.
January 4 The local TV channel NT24 has been airing an interview with AFU founder & board member Håkan Blomqvist, throughout the evening.
January 3 I entered the first ten records into the National Archives NAD database, where we have been sadly lacking representation for years, despite the fact that we have about 200-250 archives from different sources. More about our NAD project when we have accomplished more results that can be searched through the NAD page.
January 2, 2010 Spent the day at the archives with making backup copies of our new PC installation and do some more updates to our new internet connection (10 Mbit/s broadband). 
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